Sylvia Biscoveanu
Northwestern University
Compact-object astrophysics with gravitational waves
Location: 1080 Physics Research Building
Faculty Host: John Beacom
Abstract: Following the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detectors have now observed over 200 candidate gravitational-wave events from merging compact-object binaries including both black holes and neutron stars. This growing catalog has offered an increasingly detailed view into the properties of compact objects, but we still don’t fully understand how such binary systems form and evolve. In this talk, I will describe the astrophysical and cosmological sources of audio-band gravitational waves and the techniques used for their detection and characterization. I will give an overview of the latest measurements of the physical properties of the compact-object binary population and their implications for our understanding of how these systems form. I will also briefly discuss the prospects of next-generation ground-based gravitational-wave detectors---which will be sensitive to nearly every merging binary in the Universe---to probe the astrophysical processes shaping these systems.
Bio: Sylvia Biscoveanu is a NASA Einstein Fellow at Northwestern's CIERA working on using gravitational-wave data to understand the properties of compact-object mergers, their electromagnetic counterparts, and the stochastic gravitational-wave background. She earned her PhD in Physics in 2023 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and a PEO Scholar. Previously, she was a Fulbright postgraduate scholar at Monash University and obtained her undergraduate degrees in Physics and Spanish at the Pennsylvania State University in 2017. In Fall 2025, she will join the Princeton Department of Physics as an Assistant Professor.
