Gravity seminar - Mark Hannam Seminar

Abstract: This is a talk about waveform modelling for gravitational-wave astronomy. Abstracts for such talks invariably begin with sentiments like, "Accurate models are essential to measure the properties of the black holes and neutron stars that produce our gravitational-wave observations," but with the unspoken understanding that of course such models will be available. And indeed, models successfully stayed ahead of improving detector sensitivities for most of the ~80 detections in the first three LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing runs. But they failed spectacularly for one of the most interesting signals in O3, and we can expect more of the same for the upcoming fourth observing run, O4. I will summarise the current situation and the importance of incorporating systematics errors into future measurements.