This special Physics department colloquium is scheduled for Monday 4/13/15 at 4:00 pm in Room 137. Coffee, tea and cookies are served at 3:45 pm in the same room. Anyone is welcome.

Search for Gravitational Waves from Sub-solar Mass Binary Systems
Madeline Wade, UWM Physics PhD Candidate

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is a kilometer-scale, ground-based interferometer designed to detect small perturbations in spacetime known as gravitational waves. The next generation of LIGO detectors are close to completion and have already achieved the best sensitivity to date. The advanced detector era promises to bring the first direct detections of gravitational waves. Detectable gravitational waves will come from dramatic astrophysical events, such as supernova explosions and binary black hole coalescences. Even the most promising sources for gravitational-wave detections will produce minuscule perturbations in spacetime. The challenge of detecting these signals involves extracting a very small signal from a lot of noise.

I will introduce LIGO’s basic operations and discuss how we search LIGO data for gravitational-wave signals. Specifically, I will discuss a search for gravitational waves from sub-solar mass black hole binary systems. Sub-solar mass black holes cannot have formed through stellar evolution given current theories. Instead, such black holes are thought to have formed from quantum fluctuations in the early universe. This search not only seeks to detect gravitational waves from sub-solar mass binary systems, but its development also benefits future searches for binary neutron star systems at design sensitivity.