The Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background – Tom Giblin
Date: Thu. October 24th, 2013, 4:15 pm-5:15 pmLocation: Rockefeller 301
As we prepare for news from the Laser-Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) theoretical and computational physics are crawling over each other to identify cosmological sources of gravitational radiation in the LIGO sensitivity region. As one of those theorists, I will outline some of the progress we have made toward making precision predictions for gravitational radiation from cosmological sources. To the same end, I will discuss the limitations of observing cosmological sources at LIGO and why precision estimates are so important at this time. I will also present a “rule of thumb” that can be used to quickly evaluate to-good-to-be-true predictions.