Lucía Santamaría Lara

	Room: 0.60 Phone: +49 (0) 331 567 7181 Fax: +49 (0) 331 567 7298 email: (@aei.mpg.de) lucia.santamaria

Research

My scientific interests focus on General Relativity, more concretely on numerical implementations of the theory. The 2005 breakthrough has brought the field of Numerical Relativity to a point where effective gravitational waves simulating the merger of a black hole binary can be computed. On the other hand, a big effort is being done in the last decades to measure gravitational waves coming from the space by means of several interferometers (LIGO, Virgo, GEO, TAMA), under the Ligo Scientific Collaboration

. An effective collaboration between the fields of Numerical Relativity and Gravitational Wave Data Analysis is desirable in order to interchange both data and knowledge that can serve to improve detection algorithms. My PhD research currently focuses on these kind of issues.

 

About me

After completing my studies of Physics at the University of Salamanca in Spain, I moved to Jena in October 2005 to start researching on Numerical Relativity under the supervision of Dr. Sascha Husa within the group leaded by Prof. Bernd Brügmann. I did my first investigations on critical phenomena in gravitational collapse. In January 2007 I started working in a joint project in collaboration with scientists from the LSC (Dr. Badri Krishnan

and Dr. Stephen Fairhurst, among others), with the goal of using numerical relativity data with data analysis purposes. I am an active member of the Compact Binary Coalescence group of the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration. I have contributed to the searches for signals from inspiral systems with ground-based gravitational waves detectors. This efforts constituted the main thema of my PhD thesis, which I defended with Suma Cum Laude at the University of Potsdam in June 2010. Since July 2010 I am a postdoctoral researcher within the Astrophysical Relativity Group at the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam.