Agenda:
7:00 - 7:15 General Meeting & Announcements
7:15 - 7:30 Short topic presentation by a club member
7:30 - 7:45 Refreshment break
7:45 - Public Presentation
Speaker: Dr. Jeff Dror, Assistant Physics Professor, UF
Title: Gravitational Wave Detection
Abstract:
Understanding the evolution of the Universe requires finding particles ejected during different epochs. We have already detected two classes of such cosmic fossils: microwave photons and light nuclei. While we have learned a great deal from these discoveries, they have left significant gaps in our knowledge of the cosmic history since the Big Bang. Dr. Dror’s presentation will focus on detecting new cosmic fossils in the form of axions and gravitational waves.
About the Speaker:
UF Physics Department, 2023-present
UC Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, (Post Doc), 2020-2023
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2017-2020
Research Interests:
In his research, Dr. Dror focuses on gravitational wave detection in the nHz regime (10-1000 billion times lower frequency than those detected by the LIGO experiment). The most promising way to detect such gravitational waves is by tracking the arrival times of light pulses from nearby stars known as pulsars. There is an ongoing international effort to detect a signal in the nHz range, and his work focuses on extending their sensitivity to the pHz-nHz regime. This requires developing new ways to analyze the pulsar light data.
