There were three scientific contributions during the group’s meeting on Tuesday 22.6.21. . Dr. Sajal Mukherjee from ASU gave a talk on “Detectability of hyperbolic encounters with the gravitational wave observatories“, Dr. Robert Švarc from UTF talked about “Spherical Black Holes in Quadratic Gravity” and Dr. Filip Hejda from FZU talked about “Collisional Penrose process and extraction of energy from extremal electrovacuum black holes“.

The Black Hole Perturbation Toolkit (BHPToolkit) is a global collaboration dedicated to creating an open-source repository of software, data and results related to black hole perturbation theory. These tools are important in the theory of gravitational waves, specifically in the modelling of inspirals of stellar-mass objects into massive black holes. The BHPToolkit workshops bring together researchers that are already using and developing the Toolkit as well as scientists and students that are looking to do so.

The first public BHPToolkit workshop will take place at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague from 25th to 27th of May. take place in the form of a teleconference at the end of May. The exact dates will be announced soon. For the meeting in Prague itself further announcements will follow.

Registration is free and we have a small amount of funding available to support the travel of PhD/MSc students coming to the workshop. To apply for financial support please send an email to vojtech.witzany at asu.cas.cz in which you briefly describe your motivation, and please ask your supervisor to also send a short supporting email. Both the motivation and supporting statement need to be received before April 1, 2020, and we will inform you of our decision during the first week of April.

On the first day of the workshop there will be a series of invited practical short talks to demonstrate how to install and use various packages already in the Toolkit. The second and third days will concentrate on improving the BHPToolkit with a focused ‘hack-a-thon’ as well as discussion around how to manage and grow the Toolkit.

The BHPToolkit workshop, including the travel support, is funded by the GWverse COST Action CA16104 Gravitational waves, black holes and fundamental physics.

Prague Relativity Group is member of the LISA mission consortium (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). The group consists of scientists from the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (ASU), the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Charles University (UTF) and the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (FZU). In alphabetical order, the participating scientists are:

• prof. RNDr. Jiří Bičák, DrSc. dr. h. c. (UTF) Jiri.Bicak (at) mff.cuni.cz
• RNDr. Michal Dovčiak, Ph.D. (ASU) dovciak (at) asu.cas.cz
• prof. Vladimír Karas, DrSc. (ASU) vladimir.karas (at) cuni.cz
• Mgr. Ondřej Kopáček, Ph.D. (ASU) kopacek (at) ig.cas.cz
• Georgios Loukes-Gerakopoulos, Ph.D. (ASU) gglukes (at) asu.cas.cz
• Roberto Oliveri, Ph.D. (FZU) roliveri (at) fzu.cz
• Mgr. Ondřej Pejcha, PhD. (UTF) pejcha (at) utf.mff.cuni.cz
• RNDr. Michael Prouza, Ph.D. (FZU) prouza (at) fzu.cz
• prof. RNDr. Jiří Podolský, CSc., DSc. (UTF) podolsky (at) mbox.troja.mff.cuni.cz
• Mgr. Lukáš Polcar (UTF/ASU) Polcar.vm (at) seznam.cz
• Mgr. Viktor Skoupý (UTF/ASU) vskoupy (at) gmail.com
• Mgr. Petra Suková, Ph.D. (ASU) petra.sukova (at) asu.cas.cz
• RNDr. Robert Švarc, Ph.D. (UTF) robert.svarc (at) mff.cuni.cz
• Mgr. Jiří Svoboda, Ph.D. (ASU) jiri.svoboda (at) asu.cas.cz
• Tayebeh Tahamtan, Ph.D. (UTF) ttahamtan5 (at) gmail.com
• Mgr. Richard Wünsch, PhD. (ASU) richard (at) wunsch.cz