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Patrick Sutton

Professor Patrick Sutton

Gravity Exploration Institute

School of Physics and Astronomy

Email
SuttonPJ1@cardiff.ac.uk
Telephone
+44 29208 74043
Campuses
Queen's Buildings - North Building, Room N/1.09, 5 The Parade, Newport Road, Cardiff, CF24 3AA
Users
Available for postgraduate supervision

Overview

My research focuses on the detection and study of gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of spacetime. These are produced by some of the most violent events in the Universe, such as the collisions of black holes, the explosive deaths of massive stars, and perhaps the Big Bang itself. The detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO observatories has opened a new window on nature, and is allowing us to probe the behaviour of matter and test Einstein's theory of gravity under extreme conditions that cannot (and should not!) be replicated on Earth. My particular specialties are the detection and interpretation of weak signals in noisy data. I am a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and have served on various national and international advisory committees on gravitational waves and astroparticle physics.

Publication

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Cynadleddau

  • Sathyaprakash, B. S. et al. 2011. Scientific potential of Einstein Telescope. Presented at: Rencontres de Moriond, Gravitational Waves and Experimental Gravity, La Thuile, Italy, 3-10 March 2012 Presented at Auge, E., Dumarchez, J. and Tran Thanh Van, J. eds.Proceedings of the 47th Rencontres de Moriond, Gravitational Waves and Experimental Gravity, La Thuile, Italy, 3-10 March 2012. Vietnam: The Gioi Publishers
  • Sutton, P. J. 2004. Results from LIGO's second search for gravitational-wave bursts. Presented at: Meeting of the American Physical Society, Denver, CO, 1-4 May 2004.

Erthyglau

Research

Research interests

Violent relativistic events such as the collisions of black holes or neutron stars, supernovae, and gamma-ray bursts, can produce powerful bursts of gravitational waves. A common feature of these systems is that they are difficult to model, involving complex physics of matter at nuclear densities and nonlinear general relativistic effects. Gravitational waves could provide a probe of the rich physics of these systems.      As a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, I am developing strategies to detect gravitational-wave bursts, and creating techniques for locating the sources on the sky, extracting their waveforms from noisy data, and fitting them to simulations and theoretical models.  In particular, I focus on the detection of gravitational waves associated with gamma-ray bursts and supernovae using data from the LIGO, GEO, and Virgo detectors.

Supervision

Current PhD students: Maxime Fays, Iain Dorrington, Ronaldas Macas, Scott Coughlin, Vassilis Skliris.

Teaching

On Research Leave for 2016-17. Previous teaching duties include:
PX3241 - Particle Physics and Special Relativity (2013-16)
PX4124 - Introduction to General Relativity (2014-15)
PX3237 - Nuclear and Particle Physics (2012-13)
PX4115 - General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics (2007-13)

I have also served as the Teaching Quality Officer for PHYSX since 2013.

Biography

I undertook my graduate studies at the University of Alberta, studying the renormalisation of quantum field theories in curved spacetimes, and graduated in 2000. I then spent two and a half years as a postdoctoral fellow in the gravitational physics group at Penn State University, followed by a four-year stint as a senior postdoctoral fellow and then a senior research fellow at the California Institute of Technology.    I joined the faculty of Cardiff University as a senior lecturer in June 2007, and was promoted to Reader in 2012 and then Personal Chair in 2016.

Honours and awards

Head, Gravitational Physics Group, Cardiff University
Chair, STFC Particle Astrophysics Advisory Panel (to 2016)
Member, Astroparticle Physics European Consortium (ApPEC) - Scientific Advisory Commitee

Supervisions

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the areas of:

  • Gravitational Waves
  • signal detection techniques

Current supervision

Wasim Javed

Wasim Javed

Research student