Welcome to the 10th International LISA Symposium

The detection of massive black hole binaries, especially at high redshift, is one of the priorities for the eLISA mission. Our ability to resolve and carry out parameter estimation for these sources will be highly dependent on using the correct tools. In this presentation we investigate and compare the impact of current data analysis techniques and templates particularly on our ability in determining luminosity distance and sky position. We will also outline some of the future priority tasks identified by the data analysis working group.

Over the past several years, the study of alternative LISA-like mission concepts in both the United States and Europe has resulted in an improved understanding of the influence that various design choices will have on the science capabilities of a space-based gravitational-wave mission. Among the surprising findings was the discovery that the nominal LISA design was not an optimal choice for measuring the parameters of massive black-hole binaries. We will focus on two critical design choices, the length of the detector arms and the number of laser links, and by holding all other design choices fixed, we will present two main results: the optimal arm length for studying the expected population of massive black-hole binaries, and the true impact of losing two laser links (i.e. adopting 4 links a la NGO) on black-hole binary science. We will also discuss how the physics included when modeling gravitational waveforms can have a dramatic impact on these conclusions.

General relativity (GR) has been extensively tested in the solar system and in binary pulsars, but never in the strong-field, dynamical regime. Soon, gravitational-wave (GW) detectors like Advanced LIGO will be able to probe this regime by measuring GWs from inspiraling and merging compact binaries. One particularly interesting alternative to GR is scalar-tensor gravity. We present the calculation of second post-Newtonian (2PN) gravitational waveforms for inspiraling compact binaries in a general class of scalar-tensor theories. The waveforms are constructed using a standard GR method known as ``Direct Integration of the Relaxed Einstein equations,'' appropriately adapted to the scalar-tensor case. We find that differences from general relativity can be characterized by a reasonably small number of parameters. Among the differences are new hereditary terms which depend on the past history of the source. In one special case, mixed black hole-neutron star systems, all differences from GR can be characterized by only a single parameter. In another, binary black hole systems, we find that the waveform is indistinguishable from that of general relativity.

The LIGO Open Science Center (LOSC) will fulfill LIGO’s commitment to release its data to the broader scientific community and to the public, archiving and serving LIGO data sets, and providing the information and tools necessary to understand and use the data. LOSC will release the full data from the LIGO "S5" run by the end of 2014. This will be the first such large-scale release in our field, and it will teach us a lot about how the astronomical community can come together to do open science with data from gravitational-wave detectors. It will also be an invaluable resource for teaching gravitational-wave data analysis. In this talk, I will give a live demonstration of how it will be possible to obtain, visualize, and process the data, and I will discuss our plans for LOSC's offerings, including web services (data-quality timelines, event catalogs, ...), tutorials, and more.