Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Searching for Gravitational Waves with Advanced LIGO

Ben Farr

University of Chicago

Advanced LIGO recently completed its first observing run, which collected gravitational wave data with unprecedented sensitivity between September 2015 and January 2016. One of Advanced LIGO's primary goals is to detect and characterize gravitational waves from transient sources such as the coalescence of binary compact objects containing neutron stars and/or stellar mass black holes. I will describe the search and characterization methods being employed in the advanced-detector era.