Carlos Lousto

Carlos O. Lousto is an Argentine-American astrophysicist and Distinguished Professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). He is known for his contributions to numerical relativity and the simulation of binary black hole mergers, work that played a role in the interpretation of the first direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO in 2015.

Education and early career

Lousto holds two doctoral degrees: one in astronomy from the National University of La Plata, completed in 1987, in which he studied accretion disks around black holes and the internal structure of neutron stars; and one in physics from the University of Buenos Aires, completed in 1992, focusing on quantum field theory in curved spacetime. He received an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship in 1993.

Lousto joined RIT in 2007 as a founding member of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG), where he serves as co-director. In 2023, he was named Distinguished Professor, the highest academic title at RIT.

Research

Lousto's research spans black hole perturbation theory, numerical relativity, and gravitational wave astronomy. He has authored or co-authored approximately 300 scientific publications, with research funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. This method was subsequently used to interpret signals detected by LIGO, including the first direct observation of gravitational waves in September 2015. He and collaborator James Healy also discovered the "flip-flopping" behavior of black hole spins in binary systems.

Extreme mass ratio simulations

Lousto has pushed the boundaries of numerical relativity by simulating binary black holes with mass ratios up to 128:1, a record in the field. These simulations are important for informing the design of next-generation gravitational wave detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA).

Supercomputing

To support his simulation work, Lousto designed several dedicated supercomputer clusters, including the Funes cluster at the University of Texas at Brownsville and the NewHorizon, BlueSky, and GreenPrairies clusters at RIT. 2012 – Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, cited for contributions at the interface between perturbation theory and numerical relativity 2016 – Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, shared with the LIGO collaboration 2019 – Edward A. Bouchet Award from the American Physical Society 2023 – Distinguished Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology 2024 – RAICES Award from the Argentine government's Secretariat of Innovation, Science, and Technology

Selected publications