Press release – 27 September 2017

Thibault Damour receives the 2017 CNRS Gold Medal for his key contributions to the discovery of gravitational waves.

Born in Lyon, on February 7th, 1951, Thibault Damour joins the École normale supérieure in Paris, in 1970. After obtaining his PhD from the University of Paris VI in 1974, he works for two years as a post-doc at Princeton University (USA). Between 1977 and 1989, he works as a CNRS researcher and is recruited as a permanent professor in theoretical physics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in 1989.

Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist working on relativistic gravity (Einstein’s theory of general relativity), cosmology, and the extensions of relativistic gravity suggested by string theory. He made innovative contributions to the theory of black holes, the relativistic motion of binary pulsars, the emission of gravitational waves, the evolution and coalescence of various binary systems of compact bodies (black holes, neutron stars), as well as to several aspects of primordial cosmology. His work has created new links between Einstein’s theory of general relativity and observations.

In particular, he introduced, with various collaborators, in 2000 at IHES a new method, called Effective One Body (EOB), which gave the first description of the complete gravitational signal emitted by the coalescence of two black holes. This analytical approach (later completed by the results of numerical simulations) was used by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration to extract from the noise and analyze in terms of physical parameters (mass, spin) the gravitational wave signals that have been detected since September 2015.

The EOB method has been recently extended to the description of the gravitational signal emitted by the coalescence of binary neutron stars until they become so close that they collide. This precise theoretical description could allow one to obtain information on the equation of state of nuclear matter from the gravitational signal.

Exceptionally, this year the CNRS awards two Gold Medals: one to Thibault Damour for his “theoretical works (…) that were key to analyzing the data coming from gravitational-wave detectors”; the other one to Alain Brillet, a “visionary in the development of gravitational waves detectors, [and] one of the fathers of the European experiment Virgo”.

The Institute sincerely congratulates Thibault Damour on obtaining this prestigious distinction. ‘’We are very proud of this Gold Medal. Beyond the recognition of Thibault’s extraordinary contribution to contemporary physics, this prize acknowledges the essential role of theoretical research in major scientific discoveries” said the director, Emmanuel Ullmo

The CNRS Gold Medal
The CNRS Gold medal is the highest scientific research award in France. It is presented annually by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Since its creation in 1954, it is awarded to a scientific personality whose work has made an exceptional contribution to the vitality and influence of French research.

For more information :
Mini website on gravitational waves
Cours de l’IHES on gravitational waves given by Thibault Damour
Public lecture on gravitational waves given by Thibault Damour (in French)
Press contact: Marie Caillat, director of communication +33 1 60 92 66 67 • caillat@ihes.fr

Watch here the short film (in French) about Thibault Damour made by CNRS and shown during the Gold Medals ceremony.

The special properties of Black Holes have intrigued researchers for decades. They do signal their existence in nature in several ways including by emitting gravitational waves while merging. Their way of handling information is more elusive. In this workshop several aspects of this information handling will be discussed, with some emphasis on possible relations it has to the theory of chaos, thermalization and quantum information.

Invited speakers are : Barbon José (IFT-CSIC, Univ. Autonoma de Madrid), Bena Iosif (CEA Saclay), Craps Ben (Vrije Univ. Brussel), De Boer Jan  (Univ. of Amsterdam), Ferrari Frank (Univ. Libre de Bruxelles), Gibbons Gary  (DAMTP, Cambridge Univ.), Gurau Razvan (CPHT, Ecole polytechnique), Kurchan Jorge (ENS, Paris), Maldacena Juan (IAS, Princeton), Page Don N. (Univ. of Alberta, Canada), Papadodimas Kyriakos (CERN, Genève), Perry Malcolm (Cambridge Univ.), Rivasseau Vincent (Univ. Paris-Sud, Orsay), Rosenhaus Vladimir (UC Santa Barbara), Shepelyansky Dima  (Univ. Paul Sabatier, Toulouse), Solodukhin Sergey (Univ. de Tours), Veneziano Gabriele (CERN, Genève)

The conference will take place at IHES, it will start at 2pm on May 29th and it will end on June 1st.

It is organised by Thibault Damour (IHES), Vasily Pestun (IHES), Eliezer Rabinovici (IHES &  Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem).

Check the conference page for more information and click here to register.

Photo credit : CNRS Le journal

Le Mystère du Monde Quantique, the comic book written by Thibault Damour in collaboration with the comics artist Mathieu Burniat, obtained the 2017 FNAC Comics Prize in Belgium. The winners, that are chosen every year by readers and by FNAC booksellers, were announced on Friday 10 March, on the occasion of the Brussels Book Festival.

This prize recognizes the success of this comic book summarizing the discoveries that lead to the foundation of quantum physics, and exploring the ways in which they affect our view of the world.

Le Mystère du Monde Quantique tells the story of Bob and his dog Rick who meet the early protagonists of quantum theory. During their journey they will slowly need to change their understanding of how reality works – as readers we share their struggle with the counterintuitive nature of quantum physics.

So far 35000 copies of The Mydtère du Monde Quantique have already been sold in France, 4000 in Belgium, 1000 in Switzerland and 1000 in Canada.

Press Release of 11 February 2016

The Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) salutes the first observation of gravitational waves
emitted by a black hole binary system by the two US LIGO interferometers from the LIGO/Virgo international network. The Institute is very much looking forward to the extraordinary progress that gravitational wave astronomy, following these observations, will make. It hopes to contribute to analysing the data it provides on the cosmos, black hole physics and more generally, on the new Universe invented by Einstein a century ago.

More information on IHES dedicated website:
https://gravitational-waves.ihes.fr

Watch Thibault Damour 2016 Cours de l’IHES “Gravitational Waves and Binary Systems”:

And the colloquium, aimed at a wide audience, organised by the association Les Amis de l’IHES:

« Lieu unique au monde, l’Institut, créé en 1958, abrite l’élite des mathématiques et de la physique fondamentale. Avec tableaux noirs et craies. » PAR Cyrille Vanlerberghe
Retrouvez le beau portrait publié en juillet 2016 dans le Figaro

Press Release – 3 May 2016

Permanent Professor Thibault Damour is one of the laureates of the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the detection of Gravitational Waves

The Selection Committee of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics today announced a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics recognising scientists and engineers contributing to the momentous detection of gravitational waves – a detection announced on February 11, 2016.

Edward Witten, the chair of the Selection Committee, commented, “This amazing achievement lets us observe for the first time some of the remarkable workings of Einstein’s theory. Theoretical ideas about black holes which were close to being science fiction when I was a student are now reality.”

The laureates are the three founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (Ronald W. P. Drever, Caltech, Kip S. Thorne, Caltech, and Rainer Weiss, MIT). The contributors sharing the prize include 1005 authors of the paper describing the discovery of gravitational waves from the numerous institutions involved in LIGO and its sister experiment, the Virgo Collaboration. Also sharing the prize are seven scientists who made important contributions to the success of LIGO. Thibault Damour is listed among those later contributors.

In recent weeks, two international awards also recognised Professor Damour’s crucial contributions to contemporary physics. On 20 April 2016 he was elected Foreign Honorary Member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was also awarded the 2016 Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture for his “outstanding career on theoretical implications of General Relativity and in particular on the prediction of the newly-observed gravitational wave signal of coalescing binary black holes” on 12 April 2016 by the European Astronomical Society.

Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist working on consequences of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and its string theory extensions. He has made lasting contributions on: the theory of black holes, the dynamics and relativistic timing of binary pulsars, the generation of gravitational waves, the motion and coalescence of black holes, as well as several aspects of early cosmology. He introduced in 2000 (with several collaborators) a new method for describing the motion and gravitational radiation of coalescing binary black holes, which gave the first prediction of the gravitational wave signal observed by LIGO in September 2015. His work was crucially used for interpreting the observed signal and measuring the masses and spins of the two coalescing black holes.

Maxim Kontsevich, Permanent Professor of mathematics at IHES was one the five winners of the inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, as well as one of the nine winners of the inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2012.

 

Press release – 21 April 2016

Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist working on consequences of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and its string theory extensions. He has made lasting contributions on: the theory of black holes, the dynamics and relativistic timing of binary pulsars, the generation of gravitational waves, the motion and coalescence of black holes, as well as several aspects of early cosmology. He introduced in 2000 (with several collaborators) a new method for describing the motion and gravitational radiation of coalescing binary black holes, which gave the first prediction of the gravitational wave signal observed by LIGO in September 2015. His work was crucially used for interpreting the observed signal and measuring the masses and spins of the two coalescing black holes.

Thibault Damour is a French theoretical physicist born in 1951 in Lyon. After studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm (1970-1974), he obtained his Thèse de Doctorat de troisième cycle in 1974 (Université de Paris VI), and, later, his Thèse de Doctorat d’Etat ès Sciences Physiques (Université de Paris VI, 10 janvier 1979). He started his career (1977-1989) as researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Since 1989 he has been permanent professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques.

Professor Thibault Damour has won many awards in his career: Laureate of the Fondation Singer-Polignac (1978), CNRS Bronze medal (1980), “Paul Langevin” Theoretical Physics Prize of (1984), First Award of the Gravity Research Foundation (1994), ­Mergier-Bourdeix Prize, Einstein Medal (1996), Cecil F. Powell Medal (2005), Amaldi Prize (2010).He is a member of the Academie des Sciences de Paris and the Institut de France.

On 20 April 2016 Thibault Damour was elected Foreign Honorary Member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, along with 213 new members including 36 Foreign Honorary Members. They include some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, as well as civic, business, and philanthropic leaders.

Among Foreign Honorary Members, many are affiliated to IHES: Former permanent professors Pierre Deligne, Mikhail Gromov, and David Ruelle, Louis Motchane Professor Alain Connes. James H. Simons, IHES Director of the Board who is also a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Thibault Damour was also awarded the 2016 Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture for his “outstanding career on theoretical implications of General Relativity and in particular on the prediction of the newly-observed gravitational wave signal of coalescing binary black holes” on 12 April 2016 by the European Astronomical Society.

The Institute congratulates permanent professor Damour for those two distinctions. “Scientific knowledge knows no borders, and I am very proud for those international recognitions that show Thibault’ remarkable contributions to contemporary physics” says Director Emmanuel Ullmo.

Press Release – 11 February 2016

The Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) salutes the first observation of gravitational waves
emitted by a black hole binary system by the two US LIGO interferometers from the LIGO/Virgo international network. The Institute is very much looking forward to the extraordinary progress that gravitational wave astronomy, following these observations, will make. It hopes to contribute to analysing the data it provides on the cosmos, black hole physics and more generally, on the new Universe invented by Einstein a century ago.

A century of progress in general relativity

This major discovery from the LIGO/Virgo team comes one century after Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in the theory of general relativity, and after the discovery of the Schwarzschild solution, now called a Schwarzschild black hole. Many subsequent theoretical investigations provided a better understanding of these waves, a distortion of space-time geometry: the first mathematical proof of generic solutions to Einstein’s equations incorporating wave propagation (Yvonne Fourès-Bruhat, 1952), the first attempts at building gravitational wave detectors (Joseph Weber, 1958) and the proof in the 1980-90 period that gravitational interaction propagates at the speed of light in the form of waves, a proof achieved by observing the motion of several binary pulsars and its comparison to the predictions of Einstein’s theory.

Many theoretical results obtained at IHES

IHES is particularly pleased to note that much of the theoretical research started or undertaken here contributed to the discovery made by the LIGO/Virgo project team. The design and development of the Effective One-Body method, EOB (A. Buonanno and T. Damour, 2000) can be mentioned first; it paved the way for an analytical description of the complete gravitational signal emitted by the coalescence of two black holes, comprising both the quasi-sinusoidal wave emitted during the inspiralling period and the signal emitted during and after the merger. As early as 2000, before the numerical codes capable of computing this existed, the EOB method gave the first representation of the coalescence signal; it also gave the first estimate of the angular momentum of the final black hole resulting from the merger of two back holes. The development of this method at IHES (T. Damour and A. Nagar, 2006-2016), drawing on new theoretical concepts (factorisation and resummation of wave amplitude) and interacting closely with the results of numerical simulations, enabled a new set of precise waveforms to be defined for the detection and analysis of gravitational signals emitted by the coalescence of black hole binary systems. Some of these waveform templates have been used to look for and analyse the signals discovered by LIGO, in the version of the EOB formalism developed in parallel by A. Buonanno in the LIGO collaborative scientific project.
We should also mention the Multipolar Post-Minkowskian method (L. Blanchet, T. Damour and B. Iyer) for the precise computation of the amplitude of gravitational waves emitted by a binary system, and the ever more precise computation of the equations of motion for binary systems (especially by T. Damour, P. Jaranowski and G. Schäfer).

For more information:
https://ondes-gravitationnelles.ihes.fr/

Watch Thibault Damour 2016 Cours de l’IHES  “Gravitational Waves and Binary Systems”:

Press release – 27 April 2015

Combining an analytical approach with numerical methods, an international team of physicists has obtained an accurate theoretical description of the gravitational waves emitted during the last orbits of a binary system made of two neutron stars. This new result could have a significant astronomical impact in allowing the detectors LIGO and Virgo to observe these waves in the next few years.

Gravitational waves: a key prediction of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity
In 1915, Albert Einstein completed his theory of General Relativity, within which Space is similar to an elastic medium deformed by matter. The following year, he
showed that this deformation propagates at the speed of light, in the form of waves, called “gravitational waves”. A system made of two neutron stars, orbiting around each other, generates gravitational waves.

Undetected waves so far
The gravitational waves emitted, more than 600 millions of light years away, by a system of two
neutron stars arrive on Earth with such a small amplitude (10-22) that it is of paramount importance to have at hand a very precise theoretical model of their shape to be able to extract them out of the detector’s noise. Now that the ground-based interferometers LIGO (USA) and Virgo (French-Italian) are coming back online at an improved sensitivity, such a theoretical advance may allow one to finally detect the gravitational waves emitted during the coalescence of a system of two neutron stars.

A team of European scientists with complementary skills
Sebastiano Bernuzzi (CalTech, Parma University) and Tim Dietrich (Jena University) are two young experts in numerically solving Einstein’s equations by means of supercomputers. Thibault Damour et Alessandro Nagar (Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques) have developed an analytical description (called Effective One Body method) of the orbital motion and of the gravitational wave emission of binary systems made of dead stars (black holes or neutron stars). By comparing state of the art numerical simulations of coalescing neutron stars binaries to their best available analytic representations, the team has succeeded in reliably describing the gravitational wave signal up to the moment when the two neutron stars become so close that they merge together. This result just appeared in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters (PRL 114, 161103, 23 avril 2015).