02.09.2024Prof. Jan Plefka appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation

Prof. Jan Plefka

Jan Plefka, Professor of Theoretical Physics (Quantum Field and String Theory) at the Department of Physics and member of IRIS Adlershof at HU Berlin, has been appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation by the German Federal Government.

The Board of Trustees is the highest decision-making body of the Volkswagen Foundation. It consists of 14 personalities from science and society, half of whom are appointed by the Federal Government and half by the State Government of Lower Saxony. The tasks of the Board of Trustees include defining the funding guidelines, selecting the projects to be funded, monitoring the funded projects and advising the Board of Directors.

Professor Jan Plefka is a renowned theoretical physicist and professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. After studying physics and receiving his PhD from the University of Hannover in 1995, he was a postdoctoral researcher in New York, Amsterdam, and at the MPI Potsdam. He was a visiting professor at ETH Zurich and at CERN. His research is concerned with quantum field theory and its relation to gravity. Here, he made important contributions to questions of quantum gravity and string theory, in particular in the area of AdS/CFT correspondence and hidden symmetries in supersymmetric quantum field theories. More recently, he has developed together with his group an innovative quantum field theoretical formalism to answer questions in classical gravitational wave physics. The ERC Advanced Grant was awarded to him to fully unfold the potential of this quantum approach to classical physics. He is the spokesperson of the DFG Research Training Group 2575, "Rethinking Quantum Field Theory." Jan Plefka has received several awards, including a Feodor Lynen Fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation and the Lichtenberg Professorship from the Volkswagen Foundation.

IRIS Adlershof warmly congratulates its member Jan Plefka and wishes him every success in this new, responsible position.

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19.06.2024Breakthrough in Gravitational Wave Physics:
Black Hole Scattering at Unprecedented Precision

Jan Plefka, member of IRIS Adlershof

Visualization of the scattering of two black holes including a wave profile

Visualization of the gravitational Bremsstrahlung from the scattering of two black holes (BSc thesis O. Babayemi)

In a groundbreaking achievement, an international team led by IRIS Adlershof member Jan Plefka has computed the dynamics of two black holes scattering off each other at the highest level of precision ever attained. Their work, published as an Editor's Choice in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters, provides new insights into the powerful gravitational interactions between these extreme objects.

Black hole scattering is a fundamental problem in Einstein's theory of general relativity, with wide-ranging implications for astrophysics and gravitational wave astronomy. Understanding the gravitational interactions and radiation emitted when two black holes encounter each other is crucial for interpreting observations from gravitational wave detectors like LIGO and future third generation wave detectors scheduled to go nonline in the 2030s.

The new calculations, performed by researchers from Humboldt University Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, and CERN, push the theoretical description of black hole scattering to unprecedented accuracy - the fifth post-Minkowskian order and next-to leading self-force order. This enormously challenging four-loop computation required state-of-the-art integration techniques and high-performance computing resources.

"Resolving this problem represents a new frontier in multi-loop calculations and effective field theory techniques," said group leader Jan Plefka. Co-author Benjamin Sauer commented "We had to optimize every aspect, from the integrand generation to developing new integration-by-parts methods." In total millions of 16 dimensional integrals had to be reduced to a basis of 470 master integrals, which were then computed.

Remarkably, the researchers found that at this new level of precision, the resulting scattering angle exhibits striking simplicity, without the appearance of new transcendental functions beyond polylogarithms of weight three. All theoretical checks, both internal and by matching to previous results, were passed successfully.

With this breakthrough, the researchers have laid the groundwork for incorporating their calculations into advanced gravitational waveform models for the next generation of gravitational wave detectors. The higher precision will enable exquisitely accurate tests of Einstein's theory and new insights into nuclear and fundamental physics from binary inspirals.

"Our results bring the prediction of gravitational waves from black hole encounters to unprecedented accuracy," said co-author Gustav Uhre Jakobsen. "This opens brilliant new avenues for extracting fundamental physics from gravitational wave observations in the future."

The research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the context of the Research Training Group 2575 “Rethinking Quantum Field Theory” and the European Research Council Advanced Grant “GraWFTy” of Jan Plefka.

Article:
Conservative Black Hole Scattering at Fifth Post-Minkowskian and First Self-Force Order
Mathias Driesse, Gustav Uhre Jakobsen, Gustav Mogull, Jan Plefka, Benjamin Sauer, and Johann Usovitsch
Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 241402 – Published 13 June 2024
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.241402

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Jan Plefka
Sprecher Graduiertenkolleg 2575 „Rethinking Quantum Field Theory“
ERC Advanced Grant „GraWFTy"
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, IRIS Adlershof &
Institut für Physik, Arbeitsgruppe Quantenfeld- und Stringtheorie
Zum Großen Windkanal 2, D-12489 Berlin

Postal adress: Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany

Email: jan.plefkahu-berlin.de
Tel:      +49 (0)30 2093 66409  
Sekr.:  +49 (0)30 2093 66413

qft.physik.hu-berlin.de
www2.hu-berlin.de/rtg2575/
X: @JanPlefka