Gravitational-wave astrophysics is concerned with detecting and interpreting gravitational waves. Our work encompasses techniques for analyzing data from gravitational wave detectors, understanding the sources which produce the gravitational waves, and understanding the astrophysical consequences of observing gravitational waves.

Recent Research Highlights

• Numerical relativity has made enormous progress in recent times in simulating the merger of two black holes. This has potentially important implications for detecting and doing science with gravitational wave searches.  A recent focus of our work has been in making this interplay between numerical relativity and data analysis practical.  We have a proposal for creating a coherent waveform including the inspiral, merger, and ringdown phases of  black hole coalescence.  See here for details.  AEI members are also active participants in the NINJA project.
  
• We haven't yet seen gravitational waves from pulsars, but we're getting there. We search data from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration ground based detectors. These are the most sensitive detectors ever in operation and are now taking data at their design sensitivity. This figure shows recent results from a search for continuous gravitational wave signals. No signals were found and upper limits on the amplitude of continuous gravitational waves from unknown pulsars as a function of frequency over the entire sky were posed.
  
• AEI scientists have submitted entries in the first two Mock LISA Data Challenges, searching for simulated white dwarf binaries, supermassive black hole binaries, and extreme mass ratio inspirals (results are here). Reports of these searches will be published soon in Classical and Quantum Gravity