Ajit Kumar Mehta

Biography

I completed my PhD from the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), TIFR in 2019 and then went ahead for a postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam (AEI-Potsdam) until September 2022. I joined UCSB as a postdoc in October 2022.

Research

I work in various aspects of gravitational-wave (GW) astrophysics such as gravitational waveform modeling, strong and microlensing of GWs, tests of general relativity using GWs, compact binary coalescence (CBC) search algorithms, CBC parameter estimation, CBC population analysis, etc.

Selected Publications

1. Otto Hannuksela, K. Haris, Kwan-Yeung Ng, Sumit Kumar, Ajit Kumar Mehta, David Keitel, Tjonnie Li, Parameswaran Ajith, Search for gravitational lensing signatures in LIGO and Virgo events, Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL), Volume 874, Number 1.

2. Ajit Kumar Mehta, Alessandra Buonanno, Jonathan Gair, M. Coleman Miller, Ebraheem Farag, R. J. deBoer, M. Wiescher, F.X. Timmes, Observing intermediate-mass black holes and the upper--stellar-mass gap with LIGO and Virgo, The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), Volume 924, Number 1.

3. Ajit Kumar Mehta, Alessandra Buonanno, Abhirup Ghosh, Noah Sennett, Jan Steinhoff, Tests of General Relativity with Gravitational-Wave Observations using a Flexible--Theory-Independent Method, arXiv:2203.13937.

4. Ajit Kumar Mehta, Praveer Tiwari, Nathan K. Johnson-McDaniel, Chandra Kant Mishra, Vijay Varma, Parameswaran Ajith, Including mode mixing in a higher-multipole model for gravitational waveforms from nonspinning black-hole binaries, Phys. Rev. D 100, 024032.

5. Ajit Kumar Mehta, C. K. Mishra, V. Varma, P. Ajith, Accurate inspiral-merger-ringdown gravitational waveform for non-spinning black-hole binaries including the effect of subdominant modes, Phys. Rev. D 96, 124010.

6. K. Haris, Ajit Kumar Mehta, Sumit Kumar, Tejaswi Venumadhav, P. Ajith, Identifying strongly lensed gravitational wave signals from binary black hole mergers, arXiv:1807.07062.

7. Tousif Islam, Ajit Kumar Mehta, Abhirup Ghosh, V. Varma, P. Ajith, and B. S. Sathyaprakash, Testing the “no-hair” nature of binary black holes using the consistency of multipolar gravitational radiation, Phys. Rev. D 101, 024032.

8. Siddharth Dhanpal, Abhirup Ghosh, Ajit Kumar Mehta, Parameswaran Ajith, B. S. Sathyaprakash, A “no-hair” test for binary black holes, Phys. Rev. D 99, 104056.

9. Srashti Goyal, K. Haris, Ajit Kumar Mehta, Parameswaran Ajith, Testing the nature of gravitational-wave polarizations using strongly lensed signals, Phys. Rev. D 103, 024038.

10. S. Basak, A. Ganguly, K. Haris, S. Kapadia, Ajit Kumar Mehta, P. Ajith, Constraints on compact dark matter from gravitational wave microlensing, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL), {926} L28.