Abstract:

Gravitational Wave Astronomy is an exciting new field that will provide a fundamentally new way to study and understand the Universe. The LIGO/Virgo collaboration has made impressive progress in the exploration of the high frequency portion of the GW spectrum, and extensive planning has gone into developing the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) to cover the source rich low frequency portion of the GW spectrum. The LISA observatory will simultaneously detect many thousands of signals at high signal to noise. The science potential associated with these detections includes the discovery of previous unknown phenomena, the exploration of early galaxy formation through the observation of coalescing massive black hole binaries, constraints on population synthesis models derived from a census of galactic binaries, unique measurement of the luminosity-redshift relation, and tests of fundamental physics using extreme mass ratio inspirals and optically resolved galactic binaries. Following a overview of the mission design and science goals I will describe some of the techniques that we have developed to carry outgravitational wave astronomy using the LISA observations.