Observations of gravitational waves have opened a new window on the Universe. WVU faculty are involved both in the detection and characterization of gravitational waves, as well as the computational modeling of gravitational wave sources like black hole and neutron star binaries. Our group is rather unique in that we specialize in gravitational waves across the spectrum, from the very long gravitational waves detectable by NANOGrav (McLaughlin is the co-Director of the NANOGrav Physics Frontier Center), to the “medium-sized” waves detectable by LISA (McWilliams), to the “short” gravitational waves detected by LIGO (McWilliams and Etienne are members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration).
Researchers in this area include:
Sean McWilliams
Zachariah Etienne
Sarah Burke-Spolaor
Maura McLaughlin