LIGO Seminar

Maximizing the sensitivity of LIGO and the electromagnetic followup of its events

Michael Coughlin, Physics, Harvard University,

Optimizing the science of astronomical observatories such as gravitational-wave detectors and large telescopes maximizes their potential science output. In this talk, I present the results from analyses related to this endeavor. The first analysis relates to noise sources that will limit gravitational-wave detectors in the near future, which include Newtonian noise and global magnetic noise from the Schumann resonances. For both of these cases, I show prospects for the optimal subtraction of these noise sources using arrays of seismometers and magnetometers respectively. I further discuss the first results from Pan-STARRS and ATLAS followup of GW150914 and GW151226, a wide-field survey likely to detect electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational-wave events, and planned improvements for O2.

We plan to broadcast these talks using TeamSpeak. Use a sub-channel of
LIGO Lab called "LIGO Seminar", which is not password protected.
NOTE: These and all other scheduled LIGO seminars are listed on the LIGO
Laboratory seminar calendar for convenient reference.

Event Sponsors:

For more information, please contact Sydney Meshkov by email at [email protected].