Damour Fest
Adventures in Gravitation

 

To celebrate the 70th birthday of Thibault Damour, permanent professor at IHES since 1989, a “Damour Fest”, gathering friends with whom he enjoys interacting around Gravitational Physics and beyond, was held at IHES from Tuesday 12 October afternoon to Friday 15 October 2021 noon. It was organised by Nathalie Deruelle (APC, Université de Paris), Alessandro Nagar (INFN Torino) and Slava Rychkov (IHES).

The following speakers talked (a few remotely) on topics of their choice reflecting their current interest:

– Leor Barack, University of Southampton
– Sebastiano Bernuzzi, University of Jena
– Lydia Bieri, Michigan University
– Luc Blanchet, IAP, Paris
– Alessandra Buonanno, AEI, MPI, Potsdam
– Sophie De Buyl, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
– Stanley Deser, Brandeis University
– Marc Henneaux, Collège de France & ULB Bruxelles
– Bala Iyer, ICTS, TIFR, Bangalore 
– Piotr Jaranowski, University of Białystok
– Sergiu Klainerman, Princeton University
– Michael Kramer, MPI, Bonn
– Juan Maldacena, IAS, Princeton
– Viatcheslav Mukhanov, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich
– Hermann Nicolai, AEI, MPI, Potsdam
– Adam Pound, University of Southampton
– Giuseppe Policastro, ENS Paris
– Alexander Polyakov, Princeton University
– Manuel Rodrigues, ONERA, Université Paris-Saclay
– Remo Ruffini, ICRA, Rome
– David Shoemaker, MIT
– Sergey Solodukhin, University of Tours
– Alexei Starobinski, Landau Institute, Moscow
– Gabriele Veneziano, CERN & Collège de France
– Alex Vilenkin, Tufts University
– Edward Witten, IAS, Princeton

To apply, get more information about the schedule, and be informed of the latest actions, visit the conference web page.

The conference was held in a blended form, with talks given on-site at IHES and others remotely through Zoom. All the talks could be followed either online or on-site (subject to availability).

Covid-19 regulations: for those who will attend in person, masks will be mandatory and we will ask them to provide a health pass upon their arrival.

Find all the videos of the Damour Fest:

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:

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”: