Research
His doctoral dissertation was on the concept of mass inflation (not to be confused with cosmological inflation), which he pioneered with Israel. Prior to the understanding of mass inflation, it was believed that wormholes into other universes would be found inside some black holes. Mass inflation closes off these wormholes in realistic black holes.
After completing his doctorate, Poisson spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in Kip Thorne's research group at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. During this period, he became interested in the gravitational wave signatures that black hole systems might produce. Such signatures are crucial for the operation of gravitational wave detectors which are being developed such as LIGO. This work continued for a subsequent year spent a year with Clifford Will at Washington University in St. Louis.
His research now focuses on gravitational self-force, which is the force on a body moving through a gravitational field arising from the mass and energy of the body itself. This self-force is expected to play a crucial role in understanding the motion of a stellar mass black hole orbiting and eventually spiraling into a supermassive black hole such as those that reside at the centers of galaxies. These astronomical systems will be of special interest to space-based gravitational wave detectors such as LISA when they are built, because they will allow precision measurements of the gravitational field of a black hole for the first time.
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