Seminar

Mergers in Stellar Graveyards: Initial parameters to Observables

Speaker: Rahul Kashyap (Pennsylvania State University, USA)

Date and time
Venue
Auditorium

Abstract

Mergers of compact objects produce one of the most spectacular astrophysical events and hence are laboratories of extreme physical conditions. In this talk, I will present a general overview of the multimessenger signals following the merger of neutron stars (NS) and white dwarfs (WD) in light of my own research. More specifically, I will talk about up-to-date constraints on NS equation of state using numerical relativity simulations of NS mergers. I will also present some of the key results of the Cosmic Explorer Horizon Study for BNS mergers and will further discuss projections of constraints on dense matter EOS in future GW detectors. I will touch upon the modeling of optical transient (kilonova) from BNS mergers and will draw a parallel with type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) for standardization purposes. Thereafter, I will briefly talk about binary WD mergers as progenitors of SNe Ia and its other outcomes in light of current multimessenger efforts.

Short Biography
Rahul Kashyap completed his undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur in 2012. He joined the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth as a distinguished doctoral fellow and obtained Ph.D. in 2017 on hydrodynamical simulations of binary white dwarf mergers and transients produced from them. He became Max Planck Prize Postdoctoral fellow at ICTS in 2017 where he worked on testing general relativity and identifying exotic compact objects using gravitational wave signals. He also developed kilonovae as a distance-measuring tool which was later applied to measure the Hubble-Lemaitre constant.

Rahul's current research at Penn State is on numerical relativity simulations of binary neutron star mergers. He has advanced new methods to constrain dense matter equations of state using gravitational waves signals.