Prashant Kocherlakota

Prashant is a theorist interested in experimental tests of gravity. Astrophysical black holes (BHs) are modeled using the Kerr metric, which has pathological features behind the event horizon. Thus, non-Kerr spacetimes that solve some of these issues are of fundamental interest. The Event Horizon Telescope images of accreting supermassive astrophysical objects can be used to test some of these phenomenologically proposed Kerr-alternatives. To be able to learn about spacetime geometry from these images, one must also understand how accretion proceeds in general BH spacetimes. This forms another focus of Prashant's research. He is also interested in understanding the properties of the matter content that generate non-Kerr spacetimes. His older interests include gravitomagnetism and its appearance in pulsar-black hole systems, the mode stability of exotic compact objects, gravitational collapse, and the cosmic censorship conjecture.

PhD (2020) from the Tata Institute for Fundamental Physics, Mumbai, India