- Scholarship in 2022 at Johns Hopkins University
About Mark Cheung’s work
Mark Cheung is working on gravitational-wave astronomy. The first detection of gravitational waves occurred in 2015, and the number of detected gravitational-wave events will grow exponentially in the next two decades when new detectors are in operation. Cheung’s work will prepare us for the new era of gravitational-wave astronomy by modelling two effects to better precision: black hole ringdown and gravitational lensing of gravitational waves.
Cheung’s work in the field of black hole perturbation theory is focused on determining how pseudo spectral instability would affect the ringdown signals of black holes. He will also extend his work to more general black hole spacetimes. He is also developing data analysis techniques for detecting higher order ringdown modes.
Within gravitational-wave lensing, Cheung is working on modelling wave-optics diffraction effects that could leave a detectable imprint on lensed gravitational waves, and he hopes to contribute towards the effort to detect the first lensed event. These projects will help extract the most physics out of the catalog of events detected in the next decades.
Biography
Mark Cheung is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University. He earned his BSc in Physics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has previously been awarded the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government Scholarship and the Grantham Scholars of the Year Award.