SoP Special Seminar

Abstract: LIGO’s detections of gravitational waves from binary mergers made history and continue to yield insights into gravity and extreme matter. What other gravitational wave signals will be detected, from LIGO to Cosmic Explorer? What physics and astrophysics will we learn from them, especially in tandem with other astronomical messengers? After summarizing some highlights of my past contributions to searches for short lived signals such as binary mergers and star quakes, I will focus on continuous gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars as an exciting frontier for the future.

Bio: Ben Owen got his BS from Sonoma State University and his PhD from Caltech, where he helped lay the foundations of gravitational wave data analysis and won the Clauser Thesis Prize for showing that the “r-mode instability” of neutron stars could generate gravitational waves under realistic conditions. As a postdoc at the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and as faculty at Penn State and Texas Tech, he contributed to searches for a wide variety of gravitational wave signals, mostly guided by electromagnetic observations, and was elected APS Fellow for his contributions to neutron star gravitational wave astronomy. He served the LIGO Scientific Collaboration as review chair of the burst data analysis group and astronomy liaison for the continuous waves group, and was director of the Penn State Center for Gravitational Wave Physics. He is a member of the Cosmic Explorer consortium.