Two of Thibault Damour’s papers in the PRD 50th Anniversary Milestones collection

Two of Professor Thibault Damour’s papers, in collaboration with Alessandra Buonanno, have recently been selected to be published in a special collection of a few high-profile articles as part of the 50th Anniversary Milestones of the prestigious scientific journal Physical Review D.

These articles introduced the Effective one-body approach to the two-body problem in general relativity and applied it to the study of binary black holes, thus “initiat[ing] a program that continues to be vigorously pursued to the present day and remains one of the few analytical approaches to the increasingly relevant problem of experimental detection of gravitational radiation from astrophysical binary coalescences. These results have already contributed to the experimental identification of binary coalescences via their gravitational wave signatures by LIGO.”

Alessandra Buonanno, who spent two years, as a postdoc, at IHES between 1997 and 1999 working with Thibault Damour, is currently a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, Germany.

You can find Thibault Damour and Alessandra Buonanno’s highlighted papers on Physical Review D:

[1] Effective one-body approach to general relativistic two-body dynamics
A. Buonanno and T. Damour, Phys. Rev. D 59, 084006 (1999)

[2] Transition from inspiral to plunge in binary black hole coalescences
A. Buonanno and T. Damour, Phys. Rev. D 62, 064015 (2000)