12:00–1:00 pm ERC 501
Host: Vikram Dwarkadas
Amanda Farah "Discovering Redshift in the Gravitational Wave Sky"
Just like photons, gravitational waves are expected to redshift as they travel to us from across the universe. I will show how we search for redshift in the existing gravitational wave data taken by LIGO and Virgo. I will then discuss how we can use this fact to trace the expansion history of our universe with current and future gravitational wave observations.
Leah Jenks "Searching for Parity Violation with Gravitational Waves"
Recent studies have claimed to have found evidence for parity violation in cosmological settings. Parity violation may also be probed in the gravitational sector. In this talk I will introduce Chern-Simons gravity, a modified gravity theory which induces parity violation, and discuss how it can be studied with gravitational wave observations. In particular, I will show that such a theory leads to amplitude birefringence in the propagation of gravitational waves and discuss preliminary constraints on this effect from the binary neutron star event GW170817.
