Frans Pretorius

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frans Pretorius (born July 31, 1973 in Johannesburg ) is a South African physicist who deals with computer simulation in astrophysics .

Pretorius studied computer science at the University of Victoria (Bachelor 1996), received his master’s degree in physics from Werner Israel ( Topics in Black Hole Physics ) in 1999 and received his doctorate in 2002 from Matthew Choptuik . In 2003 he received the Nicolas Metropolis Award from the American Physical Society (APS) for his dissertation on numerical simulation of gravitational collapse . As a post-doctoral student , he was a Richard Chase Tolman Fellow at Caltech from 2002 to 2005 . In 2005 he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta and in 2007 at Princeton University .

He deals with numerical simulation in general relativity , especially gravitational collapse, collision and merging of black holes (and signatures of emitted gravitational waves) and cosmic singularities. He developed new methods of adaptive grid refinement.

He also studied numerically the possibility and signatures of the formation of small black holes in particle colliders such as the LHC . Although black holes form at very high collision energies, the energy required for this is, according to them, a factor 2.3 less than previously assumed, but far beyond the capabilities of the LHC. With Abhay Ashtekar and others he investigated the annihilation of black holes and he investigated the collision of black holes at very high energies.

He was a Sloan Fellow and received the Aneesur Rahman Prize in 2010 . For 2017 he was awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize for developing the first computer code that can simulate the spiral motion and the merging of two orbiting black holes (laudation).

Fonts

  • Binary Black Hole Coalescence , in Monica Colpi u. a. Relativistic Objects in Compact Binaries: From Birth to Coalescence , Springer Verlag 2009
  • with Steven Gubser : The little book of black holes, Princeton University Press 2017

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Metropolis Award
  2. ↑ Choptuik, Pretorius Adaptive Mesh Refinement for Coupled Elliptic-Hyperbolic Systems , J. Comput. Phys., 218, 2006, 246-274, Arxiv
  3. ^ William E. East, Frans Pretorius Ultrarelativistic Black Hole Formation , Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 2013, 101101, APS on this
  4. ↑ Choptuik, Pretorius Ultra Relativistic Particle Collisions , Phys. Rev. Lett., 104, 2010, 111101
  5. ↑ Ashtekar, Pretorius, Ramazanoglu Surprises in the evaporation of 2D black holes , Phys. Rev. Lett., 106, 2011, 106.161303
  6. ↑ U. Sperhake, V. Cardoso, F. Pretorius, E. Berti, JA Gonzalez The high energy collision of two black holes , Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 2008, 161101, arxiv
personal data
SURNAME Pretorius, Frans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African physicist
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1973
PLACE OF BIRTH Johannesburg