Talks

In January 2024, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission was officially adopted by the European Space Agency, marking a new era in gravitational wave astronomy. LISA will be the first space-based gravitational wave detector, designed to explore the cosmos in the millihertz frequency range. This talk will present the mission's key scientific objectives and how the scientific community is preparing for the exploitation of LISA data. I will discuss the anticipated source types and the fundamental questions they could help answer. Then, we will focus on Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs), a class of sources where small compact objects orbit the massive black holes at the centers of galaxies. These systems hold immense scientific potential for the LISA mission, as they encode a detailed map of the spacetime around the massive black hole. I will discuss how future detections of EMRIs can be used to constrain parameters related to accretion disks and modifications of General Relativity. Finally, I will highlight the path forward in preparing for LISA's launch and how to get involved in contributing to the mission scientific success. 

In this talk, I will discuss how one can use the gravitational path integral to compute the supersymmetric index of black holes as well as other black objects in string theory. The saddles that I shall describe admit a non-zero temperature, consequently lacking an infinitely long AdS throat that separates the horizon from the asymptotic region, and also admit periodic boundary conditions for fermionic fields around the thermal circle, consequently counting bosonic and fermionic states with an opposite sign. Since the microscopic calculation of these indices is oftentimes well understood yet the saddles that I shall describe now lack the conventional decoupling limit taken in AdS/CFT, our analysis represents a first step towards understanding holography for supersymmetric observables in flat space.