Professor Dr Bernard F. Schutz

Research Priorities: Gravitational-wave astrophysics, astrophysical relativity
Bernard Schutz is an American-British astrophysicist, whose primary focus is on gravitational physics. His work includes numerical simulations of black hole in general relativity, extracting astrophysical information from the data from gravitational-wave detectors, and calculating possible gravitational-wave signals.
Bernard Schutz’s research focuses on the detection of gravitational waves and the physics of compact astrophysical objects, including, in particular, neutron stars and black holes. Working at Cardiff University (UK), he discovered in 1986 that gravitational wave signals from binary star systems carry information that allows their distances to be measured. This established a new standard for measuring astronomical distances and has made it possible, by determining the Hubble-Lemaître constant H0, to use gravitational waves to measure the universe’s expansion rate.
From 1990 onwards, he developed the foundations of the methods used to analyse the data from interferometric gravitational-wave detectors.
After moving to Potsdam in 1995, Bernard Schutz focussed initially on establishing and developing the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute AEI) and particularly his research Division, Astrophysical Relativity. Research into numerical relativity in this Division helped lay the foundations for today’s numerical simulations of mergers of black holes, which make key contributions to understanding detected gravitational wave signals. Bernard Schutz was also one of the leading experts working on the German-British GEO600 gravitational-wave detector and on the proposal for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). He was the founder and one of the principal researchers in the alliance between the GEO600 gravitational-wave detector and the LIGO gravitational-wave project. Together with the Italian physicist M. Alessandra Papa he laid the groundwork for Hough transform methods to search for continuous signals from gravitational wave pulsars, thus solving a complex data analysis problem for LIGO and its respective partners. With other collaborators he invented the “F-Statistic”, the principal detection criterion used in searches for continuous signals.
At the AEI, Bernard Schutz founded in and in 1998 began publishing the online-only open-access journal “Living Reviews in Relativity”. Its key innovation was that articles are kept up to date by their authors. Two other sister journals were later established at other Max Planck Institutes. All three journals are now published by Springer Verlag. “Living Reviews in Relativity” has for many years had the highest impact factor of any open-access journal in the world.
After his retirement from the AEI in 2014, Bernard Schutz returned to Cardiff University and founded its Data Innovation Research Institute. He also became a founding member of its Gravity Exploration Institute, continuing his research on gravitational wave detection.