Physics Colloquium – Gabriel Freedman

Speaker: Gabriel Freedman, PhD Candidate – UWM Physics

Low-frequency Gravitational Wave Searches and Data Analysis with Hamiltonian Sampling

The pulsar timing array community has found evidence for a correlated stochastic signal following the Hellings-Downs pattern indicative of an isotropic stochastic gravitational-wave background (GWB). The most likely source of such a background is a population of supermassive black hole binaries, and particularly loud individual sources could be detected in future datasets.

We present work done towards performing joint Bayesian searches for both the GWB and single sources utilizing the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling algorithm to efficiently explore these complex parameter spaces. We end by discussing applications of these methods to data analysis for the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna mission.

Location: Kenwood IRC 2175

Time: 10:00AM – 12:00PM

Date: April 17th, 2025