Éanna Flanagan

Professor of Physics and Astronomy

606 Space Sciences, CRSR, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

Phone: (607) 255-6534 Fax: (607) 255-6918 Email: eef3@cornell.edu

Biographical Sketch

Éanna Flanagan recieved his BSc and MSc in mathematical science from University College Dublin in 1987 and 1988, and his PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1993, where he studied with Kip Thorne. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech for one year, and from 1994 to 1996 was an Enrico Fermi fellow at the University of Chicago. In August 1996 Flanagan joined the faculty of the Astronomy and Physics departments at Cornell University. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Career award in 1997. He was elected to a three year term on the executive committee of the American Physical Society Topical Group in Gravitation in 1999 and again in 2004. In 2002 he was awarded a Radcliffe fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where he spent the 2002/03 academic year. In 2004 he was awarded the Basilis C. Xanthopoulos International Award for Research in Gravitational Physics. In 2007 he was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Research Interests

My research interests include general relativity, relativistic astrophysics, cosmology, and quantum fields in curved spacetime. Currently, one focus of my group's research is understanding various sources of gravitational radiation, and developing analytical approximation methods to calculate the gravitational waves they emit. Gravitational waves will hopefully be detected in the next few years by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory). Another focus is exploring string-theory inspired models of the Universe with extra-dimensions and branes, and their implications for cosmology and astrophysics.

Papers

Current Graduate Students and Postdocs

Eran Rosenthal (postdoc)
Tanja Hinderer (Physics Graduate Student)
Andy Lundgren (Physics Graduate Student)
Naresh Kumar (Physics Graduate Student)
Joloyn Bloomfield (Physics Graduate Student)
Emmanouil Papastergis (Astronomy Graduate Student)

Former Graduate Students

Wolfgang Tichy, Assistant Professor, Florida Atlantic University
Steve Drasco, postdoc at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena.
Etienne Racine, postdoc at the University of Maryland.
Marc Favata, postdoc at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Ali Vanderveld, postdoc at JPL/Caltech.

Lecture Notes and Talks

Is the squeezing of relic gravitational waves produced by inflation detectable? Canadian Insititute of Advanced Research meeting, Banff, Canada, 22 Feburary 2000.
Effective four dimensional description of brane world models, M theory cosmology conference, Cambridge, UK, 23 August 2001.
The backreaction problem, Gravitational Wave Phenomenology Workshop, Penn State, 6 November 2001.
Saturation of neutron star r-mode instability and gravitational wave signal, Caltech, November 22, 2002.
Gravitational waves as probes of cosmology, Carnegie Centennial Symposium, November 2002.
Quantum Inequalities in Curved Spacetime, Theoretical Physics Seminary, Brown University, Feburary 26 2003.
Gravitational Interactions of Compact Binaries, High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Physical Society meeting, Mt. Tremblant, Canada, 26 March 2003.
Gravitational Waves, presentation to the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics, April 29 2003.
The accelerating Universe and gravitation theories obtained from the Palatini variational principle, University of Maryland, 16 April 2004.
Angular Momentum carried by gravitational waves, APS April meeting, 2 May 2004.
Implementing Mino's prescription for computing gravitational waveforms, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, 15 October 2004.
Gravitational waves from compact objects inspiralling into massive black holes , American Physical Society Meeting, Tampa, Florida, 16 April 2005.
Post-1-Newtonian equations of motion for systems of arbitrarily structured bodies , Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, 30 June 2005.
Theoretical explanations for cosmic acceleration, Physics colloquium, University of Guelph, 17 October 2006.
Theoretical explanations for the accelerating Universe, Invited Plenary Talk, JGRG16, Niigata, Japan, 27 Novemberer 2006.