Congratulations to M Smith, winner of Hartle Award (ISGRG)

Please join us in congratulating our PhD student M Smith, who recently received the Hartle Award from the International Society on General Relativity & Gravitation (ISGRG) for a research talk they gave last summer! They presented at the joint 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation & 16th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (GR/Amaldi) in Glasgow, UK. Their talk was titled "Numerical Relativity Simulations of Zoom-Whirl Orbits in High-Energy, Equal-Mass Black Hole Binaries: An Investigation of Black Hole Charge.” The abstract was as follows:

Numerical relativity simulations of high-energy binary black hole (BBH) collisions provide exceptional opportunities to investigate fundamental physics. For binaries with impact parameters near the scattering threshold, non-linear effects -- like zoom-whirl (ZW) orbits -- begin to dominate the dynamics of the systems. Investigating this transient regime in high-energy binaries provides a fertile testing ground for unexpected effects of black hole properties like spin or charge. Here we present our recent work using fully non-linear simulations of equal-mass, like-charged BBH mergers to investigate the effects of charge on merger remnants, radiated quantities, and ZW behavior. Among other conclusions, our work identified a potential universality for BBHs with like charge. Future work investigates the effects of unlike charge and aligned spin on binaries with impact parameters near the scattering threshold.