We are pleased to announce that Prof. Sam Finn, from Pennsylvania State University, is going to visit MSSL from Mon. 2 to Fri. 6 February 2009, and that he will deliver a course of lectures on Gravitational Wave (GW) Astrophysics.

The lectures are open to all MSSL students and staff who want to learn about the intriguing nature of GW, and about what they tell us of the extreme phenomena taking place in the Universe.

The course is targeted to Ph. D. students, postdocs and staff, not necessarily working in the Astrophysics or Theory Groups, and will be very valuable in enhancing people's general knowledge of Physics and awareness of extreme and fundamental processes in the Universe.

The lectures are scheduled to be one hour long, and to start every day at 10 am in the MSSL Common Room; they will be followed by ample discussion time (we have booked the room until 12 pm).

Programme:

The first two lectures (which can be found here: Lecture 1, Lecture 2) will give a basic, general introduction to GW. They will focus on what are GW, how they are generated, how they propagate, and the different ways we go about (trying to) detect them (e.g. pulsar timing, interferometry, acoustic/bar detectors). These two lectures are compulsory for all Ph. D. students, as part of their taught training.

The last three lectures (Lecture 3, Lecture 4, Lecture 5) will be higher on details and technicalities. They will present the science that detection enables, both in terms of the astrophysics of individual sources and what can be learned from population studies. This will include a discussion of what we can achieve by working with GW alone and with GW in concert with electromagnetic observations.

Prof. Sam Finn will be around MSSL all that week, so there will be also opportunities to talk with him in the afternoons.