Applications of General Relativity

The aim of this textbook is to present in a comprehensive way several advanced topics of general relativity, including gravitational waves, tests of general relativity, time delay, spinors in curved spacetime, Hawking radiation, and geodetic precession to mention a few. These are all important topics in today's research activities from both a theoretical and experimental point of view.

This textbook is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students to strengthen the knowledge acquired during the core courses on General Relativity. The author developed the book from a series of yearly lectures with the intention of offering a gentle introduction to the field. This book helps understanding the more specialized literature and can be used as a first reading to get quickly into the field when starting research. Chapter-end exercises complete the learning material to master key concepts.

Philippe Jetzer is Professor of Physics at the University of Zurich. He obtained his Diploma and his PhD in physics at ETH Zurich.  After some postdoctoral stays among which at Fermilab Astrophysics Group and at CERN he joined the Physics Institute of the University of Zurich. He works mostly on topics in astrophysics and general relativity, in particular on gravitational waves. Since 2003 he worked for the LISA Pathfinder and LISA missions in various ESA committees. From 2017 his group joined the LIGO Scientific collaboration, moreover he is involved in the ACES mission of ESA, whose aim is to test the equivalence principle which is the foundation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He regularly teaches general relativity and advanced topics on it, both at University of Zurich and ETH.