Description:

In the first 7 years of operation, ground-based gravitational-wave detectors LIGO and Virgo have detected nearly 100 compact binaries, most of them black hole binaries.  In this talk I will describe what can be learned about the formation channels of black holes using the gravitational waves they emit, and what was actually learned with the current dataset. I will highlight "expected" results, surprising findings, and associated caveats.  I will then describe the scientific potential of next-generation gravitational-wave detectors, which could be online in the 2030s. Whereas current observatories will detect at most hundreds of compact binaries, at redshift below ~2, next-generation detectors will discover hundreds of thousands of compact binaries per year, at redshifts as high as ~100. They will thus explore the high-redshift universe and the formation of the first stars and the black holes they left behind in a totally new way, and search for stellar-mass primordial black holes early in the history of the universe.

Speaker: Salvatore Vitale, Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Host: Professor Giacomo Fragione