Alex Brown awarded VENI grant: Researching neutron star mergers

Oskar Klein Centre researcher Alex Brown has been awarded the VENI grant for her work on gravitational waves and neutron star mergers. Now she will apply the powerful frameworks developed for black hole binaries to neutron star binaries, using cutting-edge machine learning inference pipelines.

Composite image of two mergin black holes, headshot of Alex Brown and logotypes.

Merger image by NASA Goddard, photograph by Alex Brown and editing by Samuel Avraham.

The VENI grant is awarded by the Dutch National Research Council to researchers who have recently obtained their PhD (in the last 3 years). It covers an incredibly broad range of topics from social sciences to science to engineering. The goal is to support innovative research and to help early career scientists gain independence.

“It’s a great opportunity to create my own research plan and manage a self-directed project. I’m excited to bring together my interests in neutron stars, gravitational waves, and physics beyond Einstein’s theory of general relativity into one project in a way that hasn’t been done before”, says Alex Brown.

General relativity is an incredibly successful theory, and throughout the years, researchers have had to develop increasingly creative ways to test it.

“My proposal takes an end-to-end approach to the problem where I tackle everything from the theory to the implementation and data analysis. The project will therefore improve our theoretical understanding of how neutron stars behave beyond GR and develop new data analysis tools, which can be applied to other problems in gravitational wave physics”, she concludes.

These new tools are really critical because we are bracing for a data explosion in gravitational wave science. Our catalogue of events will triple in size over the next year and the detectors planned for the 2030s will increase sensitivity by an order of magnitude, leading to three orders of magnitude increase in the size of the data set. This will allow incredibly precise tests as well as population wide tests.

Key information about the project

The hunt for new physics: using the power of neutron stars to test Einstein's theory of gravity

Gravitational waves probe the most extreme environments in the universe and provide novel ways to test general relativity. Binary neutron stars also provide unique insights into ultra-dense nuclear matter. The intersection of these two major fields has largely been neglected. This project will take several steps forward in applying the powerful frameworks developed for black hole binaries to neutron star binaries. It develops theoretical underpinnings needed for tests of general relativity with neutron stars and advances the data analysis methods through the application of cutting-edge machine learning inference pipelines, which have not yet been applied to this problem.

More about the VENI grant from NWO:

“The aim of the NWO Talent Programme is to provide creative space for adventurous, talented, pioneering researchers to do research of their choice, develop their own line of research and further develop their talent.”

Criteria:

The pre-proposal submitted within this Call for proposals will be substantially assessed on the basis of the following criterion:

1. Quality of the researcher
2. The applications submitted within this Call for proposals will be substantially assessed on the basis of the following criteria: Quality and innovative character of the research proposal (75%), Scientific and/or societal impact (25%)