IMath Seminar: Dr. Alan Cornell

You are all invited to a seminar featuring Dr. Alan Cornell (Department of Physics, University of Johannesburg, South Africa). This is an in-person event and it will be held on Monday, December 11, 2023, 11:00 AM at the Math Bldg Conference Room.

Dr. Alan Cornell (Department of Physics, University of Johannesburg, South Africa)
Title: Methods for solving quasinormal modes
Abstract: In this talk I will discuss several approaches to obtaining black hole quasinormal modes, such as the continued fraction method, the WKB method, the asymptotic iteration method, and a new machine learning based approach. These methods are developed in this talk to solve the linearised Einstein field equations for a perturbing field in a black hole background, that is, second order ordinary differential equations. As such, I shall introduce the standard version of these methods suitable for numerical implementation, demonstrating how they can be used to find radial quasinormal modes for a Schwarzschild black hole.

About the speaker: Currently a professor of physics at the University of Johannesburg, having obtained his PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has previously worked at the Korean Institute for Advanced Studies (Seoul, Korea), the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (Kyoto, Japan), the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon (France) and the University of the Witwatersrand. His research has focused on theoretical particle physics and gravitational physics along with some physics education research. He is coordinator of the SA-CERN programme, a member of the Inter-experimental Machine Learning working group at CERN, the Future Circular Collider collaboration, and is the chair of the Theoretical and Computational Physics division at the South African Institute of Physics.