Gravitational waves from coalescing binaries

by Dr Riccardo Sturani (Sao Paulo State University, Brazil)

Wednesday 3 Jul 2013, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

The large interferometers LIGO and Virgo are expected to start the gravitational astronomy era in a few years. After giving an overview of the past results and near future plan of the gravitational wave search campaign, the candidate sources for a first detection will be described, focusing on compact binary astrophysical systems. The application of effective field theory methods to classical gravity will be reviewed, as they are useful to extract observable quantities out of the dynamics of binary systems. The signal emitted by inspiralling compact binaries is sensitive to the gravity laws ruling the source motion and thus represents an unprecedented window to study fundamental gravity.