User:Pellegrini20/Luc Blanchet

Luc Blanchet (born in Paris, 1956) is a French physicist. Director of Research (emeritus since 2023) at the CNRS, he works at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris. He is a former student of the École Polytechnique (France), he has taught at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie and the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). He has been president of the Fundamental Physics at CNES from 2010 to 2014. He is a full member of the Bureau des Longitudes.

Biography
Expert in general relativity and the theory of gravitational waves, his main contributions deal with approximation methods in general relativity such as the post-Newtonian expansion. Since the 1980s, he has developed a formalism which allows computing with high precision the equations of motion and the gravitational wave field of binary systems of compact objects (black holes and neutron stars). The results of these calculations play a crucial role in the data analysis and physical interpretation of the gravitational waves detected by the gravitational wave experiments LIGO and Virgo. The post-Newtonian method allows to detect and analyze the gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars such as the event GW170817, thanks to the correlation between the observed signal and the post-Newtonian prediction.

Luc Blanchet also works on alternatives to the standard model of dark matter at galactic scales (MOND phenomenology), and on experimental tests of relativity and the equivalence principle.

In 2002, he received the Langevin Prize in Physics from the French Academy of Sciences. In 2016, he was one of the winners of the Special breakthrough prize in Fundamental Physics for the detection of gravitational waves, 100 years after their prediction by Einstein. In 2018, he received the Astrophysics and Space Sciences CNES prize from the French Academy of Sciences and in 2020 the Jean-Ricard prize from the Société Française de Physique.

In 2023, he received the Albert Einstein Medal awarded by the Albert Einstein Society of Bern for his significant contributions to the theory of gravitational waves emitted by compact binary systems.