Gravity seminar - Chris Messenger Seminar

The advanced generation of ground-based gravitational wave detectors will soon become operational.  Compared to the initial generation they will increase our sensitive distance by a factor of 10 (to ~200Mpc) and hence increase the sensitive volume to compact binary coalescences and their event rate by 3 orders of magnitude. This sensitivity increase coupled with current predictions for the astrophysical populations of binary neutron stars give us an estimated realistic detection rate of 0.4-400 per year. I will provide a review of the sensitivities and results obtained with the initial detectors and then describe the issues of most relevance for detection in the next few years.  I will conclude by discussing the potential for performing cosmological measurements using gravitational wave standard sirens, an area of gravitational wave research of specific interest to myself.