Dr. Francisco M. Blanco
Location Potsdam
Main Focus
My research focuses on the foundations of the two-body problem in general relativity — the question of how two massive objects, such as black holes or neutron stars, move and interact under gravity. I am particularly interested in questions such as: Can the interaction between two compact objects be split into a conservative part (describing their orbital motion) and a dissipative part (describing energy lost to gravitational waves)? What can the Hamiltonian description of the conservative sector reveal about the structure of the theory? And how can we define observables that allow us to consistently compare predictions across different approaches to the two-body problem, such as the post-Newtonian expansion or the small mass-ratio approximation?
Publications
Here's a link to my publications from Spires.
Curriculum Vitae
I grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I finished my Licenciatura degree in physics at the University of Buenos Aires in 2018. That same year, I moved to the United States to start my PhD at Cornell University under the supervision of Prof. Eanna Flanagan, where we provided a proof that nonlocal conservative systems can be described using local Hamiltonian mechanics, to any order in perturbation theory. We later developed a regularization scheme for the self-force, also valid to any order in perturbation theory. I graduated in May 2025 and joined the Albert Einstein Institute as a postdoc in September of that year.