Assist. Prof
Peter
Taylor
Primary Department
School of Mathematical Sciences
Phone number: 01 700
5389
Email Address
peter.taylor@dcu.ie
Academic biography
Dr. Peter Taylor is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Astrophysics and Relativity (CfAR) in the School of Mathematical Sciences. He graduated with a degree in Mathematical Sciences from UCD in 2006, winning scholarships to Cambridge University to pursue a masters in Theoretical Physics (Part III of the Tripos). Having obtained a Distinction in Part III, he returned to UCD on an Irish Research Scholarship, completing his PhD in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Adrian Ottewill. From 2011-2014, he held an assistant professorship at the School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin. He then moved to upstate New York where he was a Marie Curie research fellow at Cornell University. In 2016, he returned to Dublin, taking up his current position at DCU where he continues to teach mathematics and research in the area of black hole physics.
Research interests
My research is mainly concerned with classical and quantum aspects of black holes. From a quantum perspective, I am interested in quantum field theory in curved spacetimes and the associated theory of semi-classical gravity. The most famous prediction of this approximation--and one of the most surprising and far-reaching predictions of theoretical physics--is that black holes emit quantum thermal radiation, the so-called Hawking effect. On the classical front, I'm interested in the problem of motion in General Relativity including strong self-interaction effects. This is particularly important for modeling binary black hole systems where one black hole is much larger than the other, a key astrophysical source of gravitational waves being targeted by the European Space Agency's eLISA mission.
