Congratulations to Prof. Plefka and his team on this outstanding achievement!
We are proud to announce that the journal Nature features the publication Emergence of Calabi–Yau manifolds in high-precision black-hole scattering by Prof. Jan Plefka and his team and highlights their work on the cover.
Our colleagues present precise analytical predictions for how black holes or neutron stars behave when they scatter off each other, including calculations of the scattering angle, radiated energy, and recoil. Such events are a key source of gravitational waves, whose detailed modeling is vital for next-generation observatories.
To tackle this, the researchers adapted advanced techniques from particle physics and solved the problem to fifth order in Newton’s constant G. A striking outcome: the appearance of Calabi–Yau manifolds, complex geometric structures known from string theory, in the expressions for radiated energy, pointing to deep connections between gravity and geometry.
Read the entire article here.
Image by Mathias Driesse (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)