Professor Yunes’s research focuses sharply on the study of extreme gravitational phenomena that may reveal solutions to puzzles in fundamental physics, such as the late-time acceleration of the universe, the nature of dark matter, the baryogenesis problem, and the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Departures from paradigms, or "anomalies" in the data, tell us that there is still much we do not know about the universe, and thus, much to learn. Hints toward an explanation for such anomalies may arise from extreme gravity observations, a regime where the gravitational force is simultaneously unfathomably large and violently changing, a regime that in fact we are only now beginning to probe with gravitational waves. The probing of this regime may provide important hints to the answer of common questions, such as, why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? What is the true nature of dark matter? What is causing the universe to accelerate in its expansion at the measured rate? Understanding the physics and modeling the observables in this extreme gravity regime is Professor Yunes' primary focus. In this lecture, Prof. Yunes will discuss some of these questions and explain how scientists search for truth.
Professor Nico Yunes is a theoretical physicist who specializes in general relativity and gravitation. He has an international reputation for his work on tests of General Relativity with gravitational waves, universal relations in neutron stars, and black holes in theories beyond Einstein's. He is one of the creators of the parameterized post-Einsteinian framework to test Einstein's theory in a model-independent way with gravitational waves. Professor Yunes is also one of the discoverers of the I-Love-Q and the Binary Love universal relations of neutron stars, which are used by the LIGO scientific collaboration to infer the equation of state of matter at extreme densities, and he is the founding director of the Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe.
