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February 8 (4:00PM) in the 2nd Floor Conference Room in Dearborn Speaker: Ilya Mandel (Caltech) “Ground-based detection of gravitational waves from intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals” Advanced LIGO will be capable of detecting gravitational waves from neutron stars and stellar mass black holes spiraling into intermediate- mass (~ 50 to 350 solar masses) black holes. The event rate for such intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals (IMRIs) may reach up to tens of events per year. Numerical simulations show that if the central body is not a black hole but its metric is stationary, axisymmetric, reflection symmetric and asymptotically flat, then the waves will likely be tri-periodic, as for a black hole. The evolutions of the waves' three fundamental frequencies and of the complex amplitudes of their spectral components encode (in principle) a full map of the central body's metric, full details of the energy and angular momentum exchange between the central body and the orbit, and the time-evolving orbital elements. Advanced LIGO can measure or constrain deviations of the central body from a Kerr black hole with modest but interesting accuracy. |