Special Seminar

We are in the era of gravitational-wave and multi-messenger astronomy, kick-started by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Advanced detectors concluded their third observing run (O3) in March 2020. The latest catalog of compact binary coalescences from LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA contains 90 events with probability of astrophysical origin greater than 0.5. All events are believed to be mergers of neutron stars or / and black holes.

I will describe the analysis framework used to produce these catalogs and provide a summary of the observations and what we have learned from them. I will conclude by discussing improving the observing capabilities in the coming years.

Bio: Surabhi Sachdev is one of the lead analysts looking for gravitational-wave signals in the Advanced LIGO and Virgo data. She is currently a post-doctoral scholar at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She received her PhD. in gravitational-wave Physics from CalTech in 2019, after which she was an Eberly post-doctoral fellow at the Penn State University. Her research interests lie in multi-messenger astrophysics, stellar astrophysics, cosmology, and science with future gravitational-wave detectors, such as LISA and the third generation ground based detectors.