U of G prof recognized for studies of gravitational waves, black holes
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Prof. Eric Poisson, Physics, has been named the 2005 winner of the Canadian Association of Physicists' (CAP) Herzberg Medal for his work on gravitational waves and black holes.
“It's pretty sweet — it's like a big Christmas gift you didn't expect,” says Poisson, who will receive the medal in June at CAP's annual awards banquet in Vancouver. Named in honour of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Gerhard Herzberg, the award recognizes outstanding research achievements of scientists aged 40 and younger (Poisson will turn 40 this July).
U of G physics professor Bernie Nickel won the award in 1981.
Poisson studies the physics of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space and time that scientists believe are caused by violent events in the distant universe such as collisions of black holes or shock waves from a supernova explosion.
His theoretical models predict the kinds of signals we might expect to pick up here on Earth from gravitational waves, whose existence was predicted by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity.
“There's a lot of interesting mathematics and physics that goes into deciding what's going on,” Poisson says.
The U of G physicist's calculations will feed into research by scientists at huge gravitational wave detectors, including a team now refining the most sensitive instrument of its type in the United States.
Run by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory consists of twin instruments located at two sites about 2,000 miles apart in Louisiana and Washington state. Sensitive detectors at both locations have been designed to pick up the vanishingly small effects of these waves as they pass through the Earth. (Similar instruments are being built in Europe, Japan and Australia.)
Poisson says scientists are excited about what they might “see” through a kind of energy radically different from light, radio waves, X-rays or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. “Every time we've been able to look at the universe through another aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum, we've been able to detect new things.”
Those “things” may include clues about the structure of the universe and may help test the theory of gravity as a curvature of space-time.
Poisson began studying gravitational waves as a post-doc at the California Institute of Technology. His recent studies include investigating “tides” raised on black holes by nearby objects, much as ocean tides result on Earth from the planet's interaction with the moon.
He joined U of G in 1995 and is an affiliate of Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He wrote about the mechanics of black holes in the textbook A Relativist's Toolkit.
Poisson was nominated for the medal by University of Waterloo physics chair Robert Mann and David Garfinkle, a physicist at Oakland University in Michigan. Mann, who has worked with Poisson through the Guelph-Waterloo Physics Institute, says his research on black holes has withstood the test of time.
Founded in 1945, CAP is a professional association representing more than 1,600 physicists and physics students in Canada, the United States and overseas.
