WEEKLY COLLOQUIUM
Thursday, November 21, 3:05 - 4:20 PM
Location: Biological Sciences Room 241
Detecting and decoding the gravitational wave background
Dr. Patrick Meyers
Caltech
The gravitational-wave background (GWB), which is the constant “hum” of gravitational waves, contains a wealth of information about the history of our Universe. Ground-based gravitational-wave detectors like LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA are likely to detect a persistent background of gravitational-waves from the unresolved mergers of black holes and neutron stars in the next decade. The planned space-based detector LISA will see the “confusion noise” of GWs from millions of white dwarf binaries in our galaxy. Meanwhile, pulsar timing array experiments have now seen evidence for a GWB, likely caused by the combined signals from inspiraling supermassive black hole binaries. Beneath all of these expected astrophysical backgrounds could lie gravitational-waves from other sources like cosmic strings or phase transitions in the early universe. In this talk, I will introduce the GWB and discuss its discovery potential and the science we can do with such a discovery using different detectors. I will then give more details on recent results from pulsar timing array experiments, discuss the evidence we have for a gravitational-wave background, and how we can make a detection. I’ll finish by discussing discovery potential for the future, like hopefully finding anisotropy in the background, or gravitational waves from a single supermassive black hole binary.
Fall 2024 Department of Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Schedule
(This schedule will be updated throughout the semester.)
- Thursday, August 22: Welcome Back Pizza Party
- Thursday, August 29: No Colloquium
- Thursday, September 5: Dr. Derek Davis, Caltech, “Decoding LIGO Detector Data for High-Precision Gravitational-Wave Astronomy”
- Thursday, September 12: Hyunjin Kim, Caltech, “Spectroscopic investigation of the pseudo gap, inter-valley coherence and superconductivity in magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene”
- Thursday, September 19: No Colloquium
- Thursday, September 26: Dr. Zhongbo Kang, UCLA, "Strong Interaction Physics at the Electron Ion Collider"
- Thursday, October 3: Dr. Charles C. Hays, CSULA, "Cryogenically cooled superconducting transition-edge-sensors (TES) based on superconducting metallic glasses"
- Thursday, October 10: Dr. Enrico Herrmann, UCLA, "Precision Black Hole Collider Physics for Gravitational Wave Science"
- Thursday, October 17: Dr. Sara Murciano, Caltech, "Entanglement as a tool to detect new phenomena"
- Thursday, October 24: Dr. Justin Perron, CSUSM, "Quantum information science and technology and silicon quantum electronics at CSUSM"
- Thursday, October 31: Dr. Emilie Royer, CSULA, "Surface composition of the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter"
- Thursday, November 7: Alex V. Nikolian, CSULA, "Honors College Presentation: Correlation Between Low and High Mass Star Formation from Comparison of Proto-Stellar Infall Rates"
- Thursday, November 14: Dr. Chenhao Jin, UCSB, "Ultrafast isospin dynamics in flatband graphene"
- Thursday, November 21: Dr. Patrick Meyers, Caltech, "Detecting and decoding the gravitational wave background"
- Thursday, November 28: Thanksgiving Holiday, No Colloquium
- Thursday, December 5: TBA