Summer Students '24 Pizza Seminar 1/2

by Eric Lizalde, Mr Erik Giménez

Wednesday 2 Oct 2024, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

IFAE Seminar Room (In- person)

The IFAE Summer Fellowship Programme offers undergraduate students the possibility of spending the summer as a physics researcher. The program has been running for 8 years now.

In this seminar, 3 students will report on their work done in this one-month stay.

1. Bridging the nano-Hz gravitational wave gap via Moon’s physical librations

Erik Giménez, UB Student and Eric Lizalde, UAB Student

High-precision measurements of the Moon's movement due to Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) can be used to explore new Physics. In particular, the origin of the physical component of libration motion, the apparent oscillation of the lunar disk, has not been satisfactorily explained for more than 60 years. However, further understanding of Gravitational Waves (GWs), and their effect on bounded systems such as the Earth-Moon, could shed some light into this problem.

We study the possibility that GWs from the merging of Supermassive Black Holes prove to be the solution to this problem. This also suggests the possibility of using the Moon as a new type of GW detector in the unexplored nHz frequency band.
In this talk, we present the latest results of our study, conducted under the supervision of Dr. Diego Blas during the IFAE Summer Fellowship.

IFAE Presentation Moon Librations 021024.pdf