Dr. Merce Guerrero-Roman 

Although gravity was the first fundamental interaction discovered, we are still far from fully understanding it. It is currently described by General Relativity (GR), which, although it successfully solves problems raised by Newton’s gravity and explains phenomena such as the deflection of light by gravity or the expansion of the Universe, still raises many questions. For example, singularities in the innermost region of black holes implies the loss of predictability of the theory, or the undetected dark energy/matter required for the consistency of cosmological models. This opens the door to explore other theories beyond GR.

The need to recognize gravitational theory has inspired a worldwide effort to improve and build new telescopes to improve the resolution of our observations to test our theories of gravity. Some of these collaborations are LIGO/VIRGO/KAGRA to detect gravitational waves, and the Euclid mission to address cosmological questions. This project focuses on gravitational waves, which are essential to identifying the nature of the emitter and thus the theory of gravity. This is because the only possible compact object obtained by GR with regular matter are Kerr black holes, i.e., spinning black holes without charge.

A different theory will have a different solution, which, in a gravitational wave detector, may lead to a signal different from that of a Kerr black hole. Our goal is to study these recognizable differences in the signal.