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Physics Colloquium

September 20, 2018

Paul Baker from West Virginia University will present "Detecting Gravitational Waves with a Pulsar Timing Array". Everyone welcome to attend. Free pizza.

The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) expects to directly detect a stochastic gravitational wave background (GWB) from super massive black hole binaries in the near future. This will be accomplished by monitoring many stable millisecond radio pulsars and looking differences in the expected and actual time of arrival of pulses. We will review the sources of nanohertz gravitational waves that are detectable with pulsar timing arrays, like NANOGrav. Then we will discuss the fundamental techniques used by pulsar timing arrays to time pulsars and identify the GWB signature in data.

Further information

  • Location: Tome 115
  • Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Calendar Icon
  • Cost: Free