Assistant Professor Jose Ezquiaga brings NBIA into the LIGO Collaboration
Assistant Professor Jose Maria Ezquiaga has led NBIA to become a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. This represents the first LIGO group in Denmark and will join an international association with more than 1500 members, 120 institutions and 20 countries.
The NBI-LIGO group also includes NBIA members Juno Chan, Rico Lo, Miao Shang and Luka Vujeva. As part of the collaboration, group members have direct access to the gravitational wave data and can participate in the data analysis, being a direct player of upcoming discoveries
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration was responsible for the discovery of gravitational waves from coalescing black holes in 2015, which granted the founders of the project the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Since then about 100 other detections have been recorded, including a multi-messenger binary neutron star and neutron star black hole collisions.
The LIGO detectors were joined by the Virgo detector in 2017 and the KAGRA detector in 2019, forming a global detector network. Currently the fourth observing run is ongoing, with many more detections to be expected.
The NBIA team is actively working on the characterization of new events, searches of lensed gravitational waves, measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe and tests of Einstein’s gravity in the strong field regime.