May 06, 2026 | 10:00am - 11:00am
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05/06/2026 10:00
05/06/2026 11:00
Princeton University Gravity Initiative Seminar
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Topic: How to make your beyond-GR effective field theory well-posed
Speakers: Katy Clough, Queen Mary University of London
More: https://www.ias.edu/sns/events/princeton-university-gravity-initiative-seminar-24
ABSTRACT: Effective field theories (EFTs) of gravity provide a
powerful and well-motivated framework to describe deviations from
general relativity. However, their application to dynamical spacetimes
has been challenging because the addition of higher-derivative terms
generically spoils their well-posedness - the property guaranteeing
that solutions exist and are unique.
In this module, I will describe the new prescription of Figueras, Held
and Kovacs that renders a general class of EFTs well-posed and stable
to evolve within their regime of validity. I will discuss the
potential complications arising from additional massive degrees of
freedom and initial data, and how these can be managed. This
formulation opens up opportunities for numerical study in strong
gravity regimes, and preliminary results are already demonstrating its
effectiveness in practice. With these results we can properly test
EFTs against observation in the challenging regime of binary mergers
for the first time.
Jadwin Hall, Princeton Gravity Initiative, 4th Floor
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