Rockville Science Cafe Lecture Series

This month's topic: "Gravitational-wave detectors: past, present and future" with Lisa Barsotti, Ph.D.

Tuesday, November 19, from 7 to 8 PM Eastern

Online with Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYtde2grDIrGNxNz_iujAoN2AL1c-IGoI31

The era of gravitational-wave astrophysics started in 2015 with the first-ever detection of gravitational waves from a binary black hole system by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). Since then, the network of ground-based gravitational-wave detectors has evolved to include the Virgo and KAGRA detectors, and they are progressively improving their sensitivity. In this talk I will describe the basic principles of gravitational-wave detection, how current detectors operate, and the world-wide effort targeted at building more sensitive detectors.

Lisa Barsotti is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics. She has been working on instrumentation for gravitational-wave detectors for over two decades. She is part of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, and she is working on Cosmic Explorer, the next-generation gravitational-wave…