Alexandria Tucker
Graduate student profile: Alexandria Tucker
By Antonios Kyriazis
Throughout her years in the UF Department of Physics, Alexandria Tucker has achieved many awards and distinctions. But behind every achievement is a story waiting to be told. Here is a glimpse of Alexandria’s.
“I was home-schooled growing up, so I was able to pick my own books. I would always pick science-based books,” she said. “In particular, I was really interested in physics. Growing up in a small town of 95 people with no light pollution revealed the entire sky. I would just lie down on the grass and dream about the stars.”
Pursuing science, however, is not an easy endeavor. One faces many challenges before embarking on the journey.
“I thought you had to be a genius to do physics, so I pursued art. But I got rejected,” Alexandria said. “At that point I got over my fear of failure and I applied for the physics program in Innsbruck.”
Going after what has fascinated her since childhood, she emailed Professor Clifford Will and started her journey toward understanding the evolution of black hole orbits.
“I had a lot of coffee and blasted into Cliff’s office having no idea that he is a very well-known physicist. And then he started talking about rotating black holes and the fact that they have two event horizons and that you can move from one to the other,” she said. “I got extremely excited.” The rest was history.
Alexandria went on to study the radiation reaction that occurs when a binary pair of black holes radiates gravitational waves. This is the reaction of the orbit to the loss of its energy and angular momentum to gravitational waves. As the black holes spiral inwards, the orbit loses eccentricity and becomes circular, an effect that should be detectable by a gravitational wave observatory like LISA or LIGO. Alexandria worked on an analytic expression for this evolution of the eccentricity.
Alexandria is moving to the University of Illinois in July for her post-doc. She wants to stay in academia, do research and motivate people to pursue their goals. “I feel that being a professor is a fantastic position to do that from,” she said.
