Richard Brito, researcher at the Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation (CENTRA) at Instituto Superior Técnico, was elected as the early-career co-chair of the LISA Fundamental Physics working group. The group is composed by hundreds of scientists who voted for the candidate with top leadership profile and outstanding scientific contributions.

The aim of this working group is to coordinate the activities of the community working on topics related to fundamental physics within LISA.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a proposed space-borne gravitational-wave detector, that will be much more sensitive than the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). LISA is a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA and its launch is scheduled to occur during the next decade. LISA is the largest ESA mission and more than one thousand scientists from around the world are part of the consortium working on the mission.

LISA will detect, for the first time, the gravitational waves emitted during the merger of supermassive black holes or by binary systems composed of stellar mass black holes orbiting supermassive black holes. These detections will enable tests of gravity and of the nature of black holes with an unprecedented precision. Furthermore, it will allow us, for example, to study the environment, possibly composed of dark matter, in which these black hole binary systems live and thus answer questions related to the fundamental nature of dark matter.