The Swan Song of a Neutron Star Binary:Fundamental physics and astrophysics with gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence

Brand, J.F.J. van den [Promotor]Broeck, C.F.F. van den [Copromotor

Sustainable valorisation of organic urban wastes : insights from African case studies

Understanding the problems and potentials of the organic waste stream is perhaps the single most important step that city authorities in Africa could take in moving towards sustainable, affordable, effective and efficient waste management. This publication presents four examples of recent attempts to manage organic waste sustainably in the African context. The participants in the ‘Nairobi organic urban waste’ project have structured this case exercise in order to use the case studies as object lessons, to harvest genuine insights into the feasibility of a variety of ways to successfully and sustainably valorise urban organic waste streams. Three contemporary case examples of compost production are presented. These include composting by a community-based organisation in the Kenyan private sector and by a public-private partnership in Malawi. In all three cases, the project and case study focus is on the relations between city waste and the agricultural supply chain. A fourth case study describes the technical and economic potential to produce and use biogas from urban organic waste

TIGER: A data analysis pipeline for testing the strong-field dynamics of general relativity with gravitational wave signals from coalescing compact binaries

The direct detection of gravitational waves with upcoming second-generation gravitational wave detectors such as Advanced LIGO and Virgo will allow us to probe the genuinely strong-field dynamics of general relativity (GR) for the first time. We present a data analysis pipeline called TIGER (Test Infrastructure for GEneral Relativity), which is designed to utilize detections of compact binary coalescences to test GR in this regime. TIGER is a model-independent test of GR itself, in that it is not necessary to compare with any specific alternative theory. It performs Bayesian inference on two hypotheses: the GR hypothesis $\mathcal{H}_{\rm GR}$, and $\mathcal{H}_{\rm modGR}$, which states that one or more of the post-Newtonian coefficients in the waveform are not as predicted by GR. By the use of multiple sub-hypotheses of $\mathcal{H}_{\rm modGR}$, in each of which a different number of parameterized deformations of the GR phase are allowed, an arbitrarily large number of 'testing parameters' can be used without having to worry about a model being insufficiently parsimonious if the true number of extra parameters is in fact small. TIGER is well-suited to the regime where most sources have low signal-to-noise ratios, again through the use of these sub-hypotheses. Information from multiple sources can trivially be combined, leading to a stronger test. We focus on binary neutron star coalescences, for which sufficiently accurate waveform models are available that can be generated fast enough on a computer to be fit for use in Bayesian inference. We show that the pipeline is robust against a number of fundamental, astrophysical, and instrumental effects, such as differences between waveform approximants, a limited number of post-Newtonian phase contributions being known, the effects of neutron star spins and tidal deformability on the orbital motion, and instrumental calibration errors.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures. Version as appears in Phys. Rev.

Measuring the ringdown scalar polarization of gravitational waves in Einstein scalar Gauss-Bonnet gravity

We model the scalar waves produced during the ringdown stage of binary black hole coalescence in Einstein scalar Gauss-Bonnet (EsGB) gravity, using numerical relativity simulations of the theory in the decoupling limit. Through a conformal coupling of the scalar field to the metric in the matter-field action, we show that the gravitational waves in this theory can have a scalar polarization. We model the scalar quasi-normal modes of the ringdown signal in EsGB gravity, and quantify the extent to which current and future gravitational wave detectors could observe the spectrum of scalar radiation emitted during the ringdown phase of binary black hole coalescence. We find that within the limits of the theory's coupling parameters set by current theoretical and observational constraints, the scalar ringdown signal from black hole remnants in the $10^1 - 10^3 \, M_{\odot}$ mass range is expected to be well below the detectability threshold with the current network of gravitational-wave detectors (LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA), but is potentially measurable with next-generation detectors such as the Einstein Telescope.Comment: 27 pages, 19 figures, to match published version in Phys. Rev.

Parametrized reduced order modeling for cracked solids

A parametrized reduced order modeling methodology for cracked two dimensional solids is presented, where the parameters correspond to geometric properties of the crack, such as location and size. The method follows the offline‐online paradigm, where in the offline, training phase, solutions are obtained for a set of parameter values, corresponding to specific crack configurations and a basis for a lower dimensional solution space is created. Then in the online phase, this basis is used to obtain solutions for configurations that do not lie in the training set. The use of the same basis for different crack geometries is rendered possible by defining a reference configuration and employing mesh morphing to map the reference to different target configurations. To enable the application to complex geometries, a mesh morphing technique is introduced, based on inverse distance weighting, which increases computational efficiency and allows for special treatment of boundaries. Applications in linear elastic fracture mechanics are considered, with the extended finite element method being used to represent discontinuous and asymptotic fields.ISSN:1097-0207ISSN:0029-598

Inverse-chirp signals and spontaneous scalarisation with self-interacting potentials in stellar collapse

We study how the gravitational wave signal from stellar collapse in scalar-tensor gravity varies under the influence of scalar self-interaction. To this end, we extract the gravitational radiation from numerical simulations of stellar collapse for a range of potentials with higher-order terms in addition to the quadratic mass term. Our study includes collapse to neutron stars and black holes and we find the strong inverse-chirp signals obtained for the purely quadratic potential to be exceptionally robust under changes in the potential at higher orders; quartic and sextic terms in the potential lead to noticeable differences in the wave signal only if their contribution is amplified, implying a relative fine-tuning to within 5 or more orders of magnitude between the mass and self-interaction parameters.This work was supported by the European Union’s H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant “Matter and strong-field gravity: New frontiers in Einstein’s theory” grant agreement no. MaGRaTh–646597 funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 690904, the COST Action Grant No. CA16104, from STFC Consolidator Grant No. ST/P000673/1, the SDSC Comet and TACC Stampede2 clusters through NSFXSEDE Award Nos. PHY-090003, and Cambridge’s CSD3 system system through STFC capital grants ST/P002307/1 and ST/R002452/1, STFC operations grant ST/R00689X/1 and DiRAC Allocation ACTP186. R.R.-M. acknowledges support by a STFC studentship