Gravity seminar - Michael Katz [NOTE UNUSUAL TIME: 15:00] Seminar

Abstract: In the early 2030s, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will launch with the purpose of studying gravitational wave phenomena in the milliHertz regime of the gravitational wave spectrum. An important source for LISA is the extreme-mass-ratio-inspiral (EMRI), involving a compact object in close orbit around a supermassive black hole. Due to the immense structure within and duration of EMRI waveforms, analysis of these systems is extremely difficult. To begin to understand this problem, so-called “kludge” waveforms were developed under a suite of semi-relativistic approximations. Fully relativistic waveforms were far too slow to ever use in a data analysis context where millions to billions of separately generated waveforms are needed. In this talk, I will discuss the recent development of the Fast EMRI Waveforms (FEW) framework built to generate fast and accurate fully relativistic EMRI waveform templates for data analysis. I will detail the special techniques used to accelerate the production of EMRI waveforms, including both the usage of artificial neural networks and Graphics Processing Units (GPU), which are specialised accelerator hardware. I will conclude with recent results from the first larger-scale data analysis study on relativistic EMRI systems with LISA made possible by the extreme waveform generation acceleration within the Fast EMRI Waveforms model.