About Me
I am a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP).
I am a member of the Numerical Relativity group, under supervision of Prof. Ulrich Sperhake.
I have always been passionate about research at the intersection of theoretical physics and astrophysics, e.g. black holes, gravitational waves and cosmology, which has shaped my educational trajectory.
I have obtained Bachelor degrees (2020) in Mathematics and Physics as part of the TWIN-programme at KU Leuven, Belgium. I started university thinking that I would go on to study a Master in Astrophysics, but courses on General Relativity and particle physics sparked my interest for theoretical physics.
As I couldn't decide, I decide to pursue both paths, which led me to obtain a Master's degree in Theoretical Physics (2022) and Astronomy and Astrophysics (2023) at KU Leuven.
For the latter, I have undertaken a year-long Erasmus exchange to the Radboud University, Nijmegen, drawn by the interesting courses they had on offer.
Furthermore, I am the President of the Cambridge University Belgian Society for the academic year 2024-2025.
Research
Numerical Relativity
Currently, I am engaged in research on black holes and boson stars, employing the tools of numerical relativity to simulate coalescing binaries under the expert guidance of Professor Ulrich Sperhake.
Through computational simulations, I strive to deepen our understanding of these compact objects and their behavior within the framework of General Relativity.
Previous Projects
As part of my Master's Thesis in Astrophysics and Astronomy, I have studied the astrophysical gravitational-wave background (GWB) sourced by extragalactic white dwarf binaries in the LISA frequency. Guided by Prof. Gijs Nelemans, we revisited an old paper studying this background, and compared it to other components making up the astrophysical GWB.
Upper limits on the latter (in the high-frequency regime) have been placed by the LVK collaboration, and our simulation of the white dwarf GWB suggests that it must be the dominant component in the LISA frequency band, as opposed to what people thought. This suggests that we must be wary of drawing conclusions about the black hole and neutron star populations, should LISA detect such a GWB in the future.
Another leg of that Master's Thesis focused on hypercompact stellar clusters (HCSCs), and the role that stellar-mass black holes can play in their appearance. Together with Prof. Peter Jonker, I used PhaseFlow (a Fokker-Plack type code) to simulate HCSCs, in order to find that a compact population can have a significant influence on the cluster dynamics and its observational appearance.
We then briefly turned towards some faint stellar clusters that could potentially be such long sought-after HCSCs, and investigated whether our simulations could potentially explain their observational features.
Even though parts of the parameter space seemed to overlap with observations, further measurements of these cluster properties are required, such as the velocity dispersion, in order to draw conclusions.
My first actual research project was my Master's Thesis in theoretical physics, in which I studied the photon rings of black hole models in extensions of General Relativity (GR). Under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Hertog, and together with Dr. Daniel Mayerson and Prof. Fabio Bacchini, I studied a handful of black-hole spacetimes beyond GR and their observational features in VLBI images, such as those constructed by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
First, we focused on the shadow, which is known to not be a great observable. We then turned towards the photon rings, which is a more promising observable, and found that in theory it can be used to distinguish between different black hole models, and therefore potentially test GR.
We focused on the Lyapunov exponent, which roughly determines the relative width of successive photon rings, and found that its value along the critical curve can vary significantly based on the underlying spacetime.
As this exponent is supposed to be independent of the actual emission model of the surrouding accretion disk, its measurement could potentially be used to test the underlying spacetime model. Measuring this quantity in practice is not possible as of now, but future versions of the EHT could allow us to estimate it, making its theoretical calculation of great interest.
Immerse Education: Mathematics 2024
This webpage contains the different notes for the summer school on mathematics.
- Course overview Notes
- Set Theory and Mathematical Proofwriting Notes
- Algebra Notes
- Number Theory Notes
- Calculus / Analysis Notes
- Geometry Notes, the Slides should not be shared or reused.
The following notebooks are used to support some of the applications in the course.
They are Jupyter Notebooks, containing Python code. In order to run these, the user should have installed Python.
More information can be found on the Jupyter website.
Clicking the links will automatically download the notebook.
Finally, files for the LaTeX workshop can be found here as well: this is the PDF,
and this is the source file (a .tex file). Try to open the latter with a plain text editor if it doesn't open automatically.