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International Summer Research Program in Gravitational-Wave Physics:
Research Experiences for Undergraduates around the world

• How can the Einstein Telescope help understand black hole mergers?
  Einstein Telescope (ET) is a third generation gravitational wave detector that is currently being designed by a consortium of European scientists. ET could be 100 times more sensitive than current gravitational wave detectors. It should detect black hole binary mergers to a very high redshift, an epoch when the Universe was still assembling its large scale structure. Moreover, black hole mergers are standard sirens that can be used for precision cosmology. The goal of the project is to study in detail the sensitivity of ET to black hole mergers and how well cosmological parameters can be measured. More specifically, the aim is to explore what ET can say about dark matter distribution in the Universe and the dark energy equation of state.
  Mentor: B. S. Sathyaprakash
  Related Project 2009: "Einstein Telescope Mock Data Challenge"
  Related Project 2013: "Measuring Dark Energy with Binary Black Holes"
  
• Reconstructing the gravitational-wave signature of supernovae and GRBs:
  Gravitational waves from events like core-collapse supernova and gamma-ray bursts will offer a unique probe of the complicated physics driving these relativistic phenomena. To extract the maximum scientific benefit from these objects we need to be able to reconstruct the gravitational-wave signal from the background noise of the detectors. The goal of this project is to study the performance of waveform-reconstruction techniques at recovering realistic gravitational wave signals of supernovae and gamma-ray bursts from data from the LIGO-GEO-Virgo network of gravitational-wave detectors.
  Mentor: Patrick Sutton
  Related Project 2009: "Principle Component Analysis Decomposition of Core Collapse Supernovae Gravitational Waveforms"
  Related Project 2010: "Search for Gravitational Waves from Rotating Core Collapse Supernova using Principal Component Analysis"
  Related Project 2013: "Reconstructing the Gravitational Wave Signal of Supernovae"
  
• Cardiff Project 2008: "NINJA Data Analysis "
  Cardiff Project 2008: "Searching for Gravitational Waves in LIGO Data: Using Tools in Multivariate Analysis"
  Cardiff Project 2010: "Development of an inspiral search pipeline using the nested sampling technique" Cardiff Project 2012: "Search For Scalar Polarized Gravitational Waves"