Current highlights and future prospects of UF ground- and space-based gravitational wave detector research

The last decade has been a revolutionary one for gravitational wave (GW) astronomy. In 2015 Advanced LIGO made the first detection of GWs from colliding black holes, leading to the 2017 Nobel Physics Prize, and revelations about the evolution of black holes and neutron stars, formation of heavy elements, and the nature of gravity in the strong field regime have been streaming in ever since. This stream is poised to become a flood in the next decade as a new generation of detectors, both on Earth and in space, come online. In this talk I will first give an overview of my research group’s major activities in the areas of ground- and space-based gravitational wave detection, touching on highlights such as: (1) Delivery of low-optical loss Faraday isolators for the latest LIGO upgrade “A+”. (2) Technology development for further LIGO sensitivity improvements. (3) Stability testing of the LISA telescope prototypes. (4) LISA instrument simulation and performance modeling. I’ll then turn the focus towards the future and discuss the prospects for the next few decades of GW instrument science research at UF. On Earth this implies the next generation of observatory facilities, under the banner of the Cosmic Explorer project in the US. In space, despite LISA’s launch being projected over a decade away, the wheels are already in motion for the next generation of detectors, with the goal of exploring still more of the as-yet unobserved GW spectrum.