Gravitational-Wave Research Seminar

Sources of gravitational waves such the post-merger phase of binary neutron star coalescence and mergers of massive and strongly precessing binary black hole
systems offer some of the most exciting opportunities for gravitational wave astrophysics.  While the expected detection rates of gravitational wave
signals from such systems may be somewhat low or uncertain for the current
generation of detectors, they offer unparalled opportunities to probe fundamental physics.

The gravitational wave signals from such systems are, however, amongst the most
uncertain and difficult to model, owing to the computational expense of the numerical simulations of the systems which produce them.

In this talk, I will describe various ways in which the gravitational wave signals obtained from numerical simulations may be leveraged to extract astrophysical information directly from gravitational wave strains and model-free waveform reconstructions which may be observed by advanced
LIGO and future detectors.