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SYMD: SMuK Dissertation Prize 2024

SYMD 1: SMuK Dissertation Prize 2024

SYMD 1.1: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 11. März 2024, 14:15–14:45, HBR 14: HS 1

Gravity tests with pulsars using new-generation radio telescopes — •Huanchen Hu — Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie

The cosmic clocks -- pulsars, as strongly self-gravitating objects with core densities significantly exceeding nuclear density -- are ideal laboratories for testing gravity in strong fields and studying behaviour of matter at extreme densities. Since the discovery of the Hulse-Taylor pulsar exactly 50 years ago, studies of binary pulsars have delivered numerous best tests of General Relativity (GR) including gravitational wave (GW) emission, along with high precision neutron star mass measurements that place tight constraints on dense matter properties. While the leading terms of GR effects have been well tested, new-generation radio telescopes such as MeerKAT offer unrivalled precision for testing higher-order GR effects in the orbital dynamics as well as photon propagation time, some of which are not accessible with other experiments. Furthermore, pulsars also serve as cosmic detectors for nanohertz GWs, primarily from supermassive black hole binaries, and the first evidence of a GW background has recently been reported. In this talk, I will focus on presenting the current best test of photon propagation effects using the Double Pulsar and advances in nanohertz GW detection with pulsar timing arrays. I will show that MeerKAT and the forthcoming Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will soon enable new gravity tests and exciting measurements including the neutron star moment of inertia, providing further constraints on the equation of state of matter at extreme densities.

Keywords: pulsars; general relativity; gravitational waves; neutron stars; dense matter