Macarena Lagos

Professional Information

Research Positions

Oct 2023 - Present: Faculty member at the Institute of Astrophysics, at Andres Bello University, Santiago, Chile.
Oct 2020 - Sep 2023: Innovative Cosmology Theory Fellow at Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, NY, US.
Jul 2021 - Nov 2023: Guest Researcher, Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, NY, US.
Oct 2017 - Sep 2020: Postdoctoral Fellow at Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, IL, US.
Sep 2013 - Sep 2017: Academic visitor at the University of Oxford, UK.

Education

Sep 2013 - Sep 2017: PhD in Physics at Imperial College London, UK. Download thesis.
Aug 2010 - Jul 2013: MSc in Physics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile. Download thesis.
Mar 2006 - Aug 2010: Bachelor in Physics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile.

Publications

You can find here some highlighted publications. The full record can be found in INSPIRE

Nonlinearities in Black Hole Ringdowns

Phys. Rev. Letter 130, 081402 (2023)

In this Letter, we show that second-order effects are necessary for modeling ringdowns from BH merger simulations. The nonlinear mode’s amplitude is comparable to or even larger than that of other linear modes.
Phase effects from strong gravitational lensing of gravitational waves

Phys. Rev. D 103, 064047 (2021)

In this paper we show that lensed gravitational waves suffer from phase shifts, which can be used as distinct signatures for precessing or unequal-mass binaries.
Standard Sirens as a Novel Probe of Dark Energy

Phys. Rev. Letters 124, 061101 (2019)

In this letter we argue that Lunsar Laser Ranging observations constrain a different type of gravitational internaction to that constrained from gravitational wave standard sirens.
Standard sirens with a running Planck mass

Phys. Rev. D 99, 083504 (2019)

In this paper we forecast constraints with standard sirens on the expansion of the universe H0 and a modified gravity parameter of running planck mass. We show thesetwo constraints are degenerate and modified gravity can bias H0.
A general theory of linear cosmological perturbations: stability conditions, the quasistatic limit and dynamics

JCAP 1803, 021 (2018)

In this paper we show a general technique to parametrize cosmological perturbations in scalar-tensor, vector-tensor and bimetric gravity theories. We analyze general predictions of these theories.
Strong constraints on cosmological gravity from GW170817 and GRB 170817A

Phys. Rev. Letters 119, 251301 (2017)

In this letter we show that the first multi-messenger event witg gravitational waves constrains a large family of modified cosmological models previously considered in the literature.