CALTECH  NEWS RELEASE
March 9, 2009

Sherman Fairchild Foundation Gift Allows Caltech and Cornell
Scientists
to Continue Simulating Warped Space-time


PASADENA, Calif. - The Sherman Fairchild Foundation has awarded $3.1
million to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to
support
the Caltech-Cornell Program for Simulation of eXtreme Spacetimes
(SXS)
through 2013. Earlier funding from the foundation, along with federal
grants, built the renowned, eight-year-old SXS program, in which then-
postdoctoral student Frans Pretorius achieved the first complete
simulation of the collision and merger of two black holes by solving
Einstein's relativity equations on supercomputers ("numerical
relativity").

Under the auspices of Caltech's Kip Thorne, the Richard P. Feynman
Professor of Theoretical Physics, and the hands-on leadership of Drs.
Lee Lindblom and Mark Scheel at Caltech and Professor Saul Teukolsky
and Dr. Larry Kidder at Cornell, the SXS team is perfecting a
computer
code that employs a highly accurate, but challenging mathematical
technique called the "spectral method."  With their Spectral Einstein
Code (SpEC), as they call it, the SXS team is simulating neutron
stars
being ripped apart by black holes, and the collisions of black holes.
These cataclysmic events create wild oscillations in the fabric of
space and time, and send gravitational waves rippling through the
universe, phenomena that the team simulates with exquisite detail.

These simulations are the theory side of a theoretical and
observational collaboration aimed at revealing the roles of highly
warped spacetime in our universe.  The observational side includes
the
gravitational waves.  They will be observed by the Caltech-led Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and by a future
gravitational-wave detector in space, called LISA.  When searching
for
waves in LIGO's or LISA's noisy data, gravitational astronomers need
to know what wave shapes to look for--and when interpreting observed
waves, the scientists must know precisely what wave shapes are
produced by each of a myriad of possible wave sources.  Computer
simulations provide the answers.

In their black-hole simulations, the SXS team has already achieved
the
high accuracies that will ultimately be needed by LIGO scientists
(3/1000 of a wave cycle out of hundreds or thousands of cycles), but
only for holes that are not spinning, or have spins in special
directions.  By contrast, other physicists in Europe and the United
States, using a more conventional technique called "finite
differencing," are able to simulate robustly a wider range of black
holes, but with accuracies much worse than LIGO's ultimate
requirements.

The Fairchild Foundation's gift, together with continuing federal
funding, will pay supercomputing costs and the salaries for the SXS
team's talented young researchers as they make their SpEC code fully
robust, carry out thousands of simulations in support of LIGO, and
begin simulating other warped-spacetime phenomena, such as the cores
of supernovae, the "singular" cores of black holes, and the collapse
of wormholes.

"The Sherman Fairchild Foundation is a core supporter of science and
scholarship and a great friend to Caltech," says Caltech president
Jean-Lou Chameau. "The foundation's investments in Caltech have
advanced science and engineering in several fields. Its pivotal early
support for the SXS research program changed the face of numerical
relativity. With gravitational-wave detection and supercomputing
capabilities accelerating, the foundation's new gift is timed to once
again spur dramatic breakthroughs in theoretical physics."

Says Thorne, "With this grant, our talented team will simulate the
phenomena that LIGO observes, and will gain insights, for the first
time, into how warped space and warped time behave when thrown into
wild motions like the ocean in a storm.  This has become my own
personal research passion."

Saul Teukolsky, the leader of the Cornell part of the SXS team, says,
"Until recently, I was worried that the experimenters might detect
gravitational waves from black holes and we theorists would not be
able to say whether the observations agreed with the predictions of
Einstein's theory or not. But now I'm confident that we'll be
ready when the waves are detected."

A supporter of Caltech for many years, the Sherman Fairchild
Foundation has also endowed the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral
Scholars Program and provided vital funding for the Cahill Center for
Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Center for Computational Research in
Biology, and the Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering and Applied
Science.

###

About Caltech:

Caltech is recognized for its highly select student body of 900
undergraduates and 1,200 graduate students, and for its outstanding
faculty. Since 1923, Caltech faculty and alumni have garnered 32 Nobel
=

Prizes and five Crafoord Prizes.

In addition to its prestigious on-campus research programs, Caltech
operates the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, the Palomar
Observatory, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
(LIGO), and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Caltech is a private
university in Pasadena, California. For more information, visit =
http://www.caltech.edu
.

Jon R. Weiner
Director of Media Relations
California Institute of Technology
Ph: (626) 395-3226
Fax: (626) 577-5492
Email: jrweiner{at}caltech.edu
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/
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