Gravitational Wave Discovery: The First Decade
A decade on from the first observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger the detection of gravitational waves has become routine. The increasing sensitivity of the gravitational wave detectors and the coordination of the global detector network has yielded significant increases in the rate of observed events and their signal to noise ratio, generating increasing scientific payoff through gravitational waves themselves and honing the gravitational wave event based alert system for multi-messenger events. In this talk I will provide an overview of gravitational wave detectors and the network, review the last decade of instrumental upgrades in the gravitational wave network, and discuss the upgrades currently underway and plans for the future of the field.
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- University of Western Australia
- Fairway, Carpark 15, 3rd Floor
- Crawley, Western Australia
- Australia 6009
- Building: Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering Building (226)
- Room Number: Billings Room (303)
Speakers
Robert L. Ward of Australian National University
Biography:
Professor Robert Ward is an expert in quantum precision measurement and gravitational wave detection. He began research into gravitational wave detection in 2004, receiving his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 2010 for experimental work prototyping the Advanced LIGO interferometers that first detected gravitational waves in 2015, as well as analysing LIGO data to search for stochastic gravitational waves. He undertook postdoctoral research at the CNRS as a member of the Virgo gravitational wave collaboration, completing the optical design of the Advanced Virgo gravitational wave detector. In 2011, he joined the ANU Centre for Gravitational Physics where he worked on commissioning the Advanced LIGO detectors, led and conducted research to mitigate the seismic, thermal and quantum noises limiting gravitational wave detectors, including quantum enhancement methods and techniques, and established new education programs for instrumentation and measurement. While at the ANU he also established the Australian research effort for the Breakthrough Starshot program. In March 2025, he became Director of the ANU Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics.