The quest for the Gravitational-Wave Stochastic Background

by Tania Regimbau

Wednesday 17 May 2017, 11:30 → 13:30 Europe/Zurich

4/2-011 - TH common room (CERN)

A primary target for gravitational wave astronomy is the detection of a stochastic background formed by the superposition of many unresolved independent sources at different stages of the evolution of the Universe.  The recent observations of GW150914 and GW151226 imply that the contribution of binary black hole mergers up to a redshift z~20 may be detectable by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo in the coming years. In this talk, I will give an overview of the different sources and present the data analysis methods used in the LIGO/Virgo collaboration to measure the strength of the GW stochastic background.  I will also discuss how the future generation of detectors can be used to remove the astrophysical contribution in order to observe the signal of cosmological origin.