Analog Gravity Meets Gravitational Waves
IFPU
19 – 23 January 2026
Black holes are the most extreme objects in the Universe and challenge our fundamental understanding of space, time, and quantum mechanics in a unique way. In this IFPU Focus Week, we connect communities that explore black hole physics from different perspectives: laboratory experiments of analog black holes and gravitational wave measurements from binary compact mergers. While modeling and data analysis have been essential cornerstones of the gravitational wave community, they have not been widely explored in applications of analog gravity experiments. At the same time, analog gravity systems allow for rich phenomenology and are valuable for exploring novel effects beyond general relativity that could be searched for in gravitational wave data.
Meeting website: https://workshops.aei.mpg.de/analog-gravity-meets-gravitational-waves/
Participants:
- Saulo Albuquerque (University of Urbino, Italy)
- Alejandro Cárdenas-Avendaño (Wake Forest University, United States)
- Kyriakos Destounis (CENTRA, IST, Lisbon, Portugal)
- Jonathan Gair (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam, Germany)
- Tobias Haas (University of Ulm, Germany)
- Maciej Jarema (University of Nottingham, United Kingdom)
- Kostas D. Kokkotas (University of Tübingen, Germany)
- Friedrich Koenig (University of St Andrews, United Kingdom)
- Stefano Liberati (SISSA and IFPU, Trieste, Italy)
- Martina Muratore (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam, Germany)
- Sam Patrick (King’s College London, United Kingdom)
- Chantal Pitte (SISSA, Trieste, Italy)
- Leonardo Solidoro (University of Nottingham, United Kingdom)
- Sebastian H. Völkel (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam, Germany)
- Silke Weinfurtner (University of Nottingham, United Kingdom)
- Torsten V. Zache (Innsbruck University & Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Innsbruck, Austria)
Organisers:
- Sebastian H. Völkel (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), Potsdam, Germany)
- Kostas D. Kokkotas (University of Tübingen, Germany)
- Silke Weinfurtner (University of Nottingham, UK)
- Stefano Liberati (SISSA and IFPU, Italy)