Probing Strong Gravity with Gravitational Waves

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Gravitational wave astrophysics is entering a new era of discovery and exploration, with first detections expected within the next few years with Advanced LIGO. One of the key missions of the LIGO project is to test Einstein's theory of General Relativity where it has never been tested before: where the gravitational forces are enormous compared to those found in the solar system. Such a task is achievable because gravitational waves encode information about the strong gravitational forces present when black holes and neutron stars collide to produce gravitational waves. This award supports a research program to develop and implement a generic and model-independent framework to test Einstein's theory of General Relativity and to search for anomalous deviations from it in gravitational wave data. The necessary tools to achieve this objective will be developed and implemented, so that they can be readily deployed in LIGO.The research will enable exploitation of the full discovery potential of gravitational wave detection. This type of research is also timely and relevant, in view of upcoming, advanced detectors and the dawn of gravitational wave astrophysics. While the detection of a departure from Einstein's predictions could signal transformative new physics, the absence of such departures could provide strong confirmation for general relativity in an as yet untested regime.