Physics Colloquium
Monday, April 23, 2012, 04:00 PM
Enineering Building (Hammond Auditorium), Room 120

"Waveforms for Gravitational Wave Astronomy," presented by Lee Lindblom, Ph.D.

Refreshments will be available at 3:45.

ABSTRACT:

This talk will provide a brief introduction to gravitational wave astronomy: what are gravitational waves, what kinds of sources emit them, how are they detected? The most sensitive methods of detecting signals in noisy data use a detailed knowledge of the signal to process the data. The main focus of this talk will concentrate on the computation of accurate waveforms for gravitational wave data analysis. How are the waveforms computed? How accurate do these model waveforms need the be? How is their accuracy evaluated?

BIO:

Lee Lindblom earned his undergraduate degree in Physics at Caltech, and then graduate egrees in Theoretical Physics at the University of Maryland at College Park. He held stdoctoral positions at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Stanford University. He was an Enrico Fermi Fellow and an Arhur H. Compton Lecturer at the University of Chicago. He held a faculty position with the rank of Professor at Montana State University in Bozeman for a number of years. He has been working at Caltech as a member of the research faculty in recent years, and currently holds the title, Senior Research Scientist. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

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Event Contact: Kathy Reischauer can be reached at (970) 491-6206

Sponsored by the Department of Physics.