TAPIR Seminar
I am a graduate student in physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) working with Dr. Yanbei Chen where I am fully support by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, and Gates Foundation. My primary interests are in relativity, gravitational waves, and cosmology where I am a member of both the Theoretical AstroPhysics Including Relativity (TAPIR) Group and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (half-membership). In particular, I work on tests of relativity and astrophysics through gravitational wave observations, some examples being beyond-GR dispersion & polarization, GW ringdown tests of GR, and next generation detectors.
As LIGO continues its third observing run, the added gravitational wave (GW) events provide the promise of further tests of general relativity (GR). In the future the early inspiral of a select number of stellar mass black-hole binaries, like GW150914, will be detectable in frequency bands as low as 10-100 mHz by future space-based detectors. Multi-band GW astronomy is a promising avenue for improved tests of GR, both in the weak-field regime and its propagation, constraints on eccentricity, and enhanced parameter estimation techniques, among other possibilities. Space-based detectors will also predict, sometimes with years of forewarning, the time with which two black holes will merge, which will act as a forewarning to potential EM counterparts and as an unprecedented opportunity to actively configure ground-based detectors to optimize for specific features of a GW signal. This talk will discuss improvements in tests of GR, added benefits of multi-band GW astronomy, and discuss active interferometric techniques to target specific features of a GW signal and methods to optimize advanced (LIGO and Virgo) and third generation (e.g., Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope) detectors to enhance black-hole spectroscopy.