Princeton University Gravity Group Lunch Seminar

ADDED. In this talk, I will present my recent work on few-body interactions involving white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. I will especially discuss the effects of including tidal couplings and general relativistic effects in the N-body equation of motion, corrections that currently are omitted in many new state-of-the-art codes. The inclusion of such dissipative terms leads to much higher merger rates, and plays a key role in describing the rate of high-eccentricity black hole / neutron star gravitational wave (GW) mergers and white dwarf disruptions. This has several observable consequences for both LIGO and LISA. I will also show how triple black hole interactions in AGN disks might lead to double GW merger events. Many of my results in this talk will be based on a new analytical solution I recently found to the chaotic three-body problem with tides and GW emission included in the equation of motion.