El objetivo principal de este Proyecto es preparar la integración completa de nuestro grupo de trabajo en la estructura de LISA, la primera antena de radiación gravitatoria que operará desde el espacio. LISA está concebida como una misión conjunta entre ESA y NASA.

La presente Acción Especial es para comenzar el desarrollo de las actividades asociadas al Proyecto que incluye la participación española en la misión LISA Path-Finder de la Agencia Espacial Europea (ESA), en la cual participan también otros seis países europeos.

Spanish activities for LISA PathFinder after successful Preliminary Design Revies (PDR). These include the diagnostics subsystem and the Data Manhagement Unit (DMU).

Validation and other activities related to the devolopment of the DMU software.

Redundancia de la DMU (Data Management Unit) para el LTP (LISA Test-Flight Package)

The structure and dynamics of hadrons is a subject related to some of the most fundamental issues of contemporary physics, concerning our understanding of Nature and the composition of the matter of which the universe is made; it studies strongly interacting matter in all its manifestations and aims at understanding its properties and interactions in terms of the underlying fundamental theory, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The field of hadronic physics has a long history and a wide range of applications: for example, from phenomenological descriptions of nucleon-nucleon, hadron-hadron interactions and the hadron spectrum, to present day ideas on the quark-gluon structure of hadrons, heavy quark symmetries, effective field theories and novel phases of matter. Its typical feature is the strict interplay and symbiotic collaboration between theoretical and experimental activities: the fundamental QCD theory is based on experimental observations, and has to be checked in its new predictions based on perturbative expansions; when such pQCD cannot be applied one has to resort to non-perturbative models and theories and test their predictions in comparison with data; experiments are often devised and performed according to models and theories, which, in turn, are inspired by experimental data. With the advent of the FAIR and J-PARC facilities and on-going experimental efforts at Jefferson Lab, ELSA (Bonn), MAMI (Mainz), HIGS (TUNL) and other laboratories, new fields of research in hadron physics open, in particular the connection and interplay between the light and the heavy quark sector of QCD, effective field theory methods to supplement lattice QCD calculations in the chiral regime and the structure of hadrons and their interactions when embedded in nuclei.

The Helmholtz International Center for FAIR (HIC for FAIR) constitutes a unique think tank for forefront interdisciplinary theoretical and experimental research associated with the international large-scale Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research. FAIR is the new planned accelerator facility at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH at Darmstadt.

We have generalised a spectral solver for the generation of black-hole binary initial data with non-vanishing momenta to arbitrary dimensionality of the spacetime in PRD 84, 084039 (2011). The initial data generated with this code will form the basis for our time evolutions of collisions of initially boosted black holes in D>4 dimensional spacetimes. We have verified the exponential convergence properties of the code and demonstrated that initial data as accurate as in the traditional four-dimensional case can be obtained via increasing the number of spectral colocation points. Second, we have performed head-on collisions in 3+1 spacetime dimensions of black-hole binaries with mass ratios between 1 and 1/100 starting from rest in PRD 84, 084038 (2011). We have extracted the gravitational waves from the collisions and compared the results with those obtained in the point particle limit. For all mass ratios, we observe surprisingly good agreement in the resulting dominant quadrupole mode of the gravitational radiation, but subdominant modes with odd multipolar index l are strongly suppressed for comparable mass ratios. A review of numerical studies of black-hole dynamics is given in arXiv:1107.2819 [gr-qc].

We have performed numerical simulations of black holes in the framework of general relativity for the purpose of using them in the analysis of gravitational wave data from gravitational wave detectors, LIGO, VIRGO and LISA, and for the analysis of experimental data from parton-parton collisions as performed at the LHC. Specifically, we have evolved two types of black-hole binaries: (i) The inspiral of astrophysical binary systems, considered to be among the most promising sources of gravitational waves to be detected with detectors such as LIGO, VIRGO or LISA. (ii) High-energy collisions of black holes for the purpose of modeling particle collisions as performed at the LHC which might result in the formation of black holes according to certain models invoking extra dimensions to explain the hierarchy problem in physics.

LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) is a future joint mission between NASA and ESA whose main goal is to detect and analyze gravitational radiation from several astrophysical and cosmological sources. It is expected that the discoveries that will be made using LISA observations will revolutionize our knowledge in astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics. Two of the main sources of gravitational waves that LISA will observe are: (i) the inspiral, merger and ringdown of a binary black hole (around one million times the mass of the Sun) throughout the observable universe, and (ii) the inspiral of a stellar compact object (1 to 50 times the mass of the Sun) into a massive black hole sitting at a galactic center, also known as Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs). Numerical simulations of these systems are crucial to obtain precise theoretical waveform templates that will be use to separate the signals from the LISA noise, and also to estimate with precision the physical parameters of the systems. These simulations are done in the context of the General Theory of Relativity and its perturbative version. In the case of the full theory we have non-linear system of couple Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) whereas in the case of the perturbative theory we have to deal with the linearized version of the equations.