Narrow Results

Gravitational wave astronomy opened dramatically in September 2015 with the LIGO discovery of a distant and massive binary black hole coalescence. The more recent discovery of a binary neutron star merger, followed by a gamma ray burst (GRB) and a kilonova, reinforces the excitement of this new era, in which we may soon see other sources of gravitational waves, including continuous, nearly monochromatic signals. Potential continuous wave (CW) sources include rapidly spinning galactic neutron stars and more exotic possibilities, such as emission from axion Bose Einstein “clouds” surrounding black holes. Recent searches in Advanced LIGO data are presented, and prospects for more sensitive future searches are discussed.

In this paper, we examine the correlation functions associated with intensity interferometry and gravito-optics of gravitational wave (GW) signals from compact binary coalescences (CBC). Previous theoretical studies of the gravito-optics of GWs have concentrated on the characterization of both the classical and the nonclassical properties of signals from cosmological sources in the early Universe. These previous works assume a periodic signal similar to the signals studied widely in optics and quantum optics and do not apply to transient signals. We develop the gravito-optics of intensity correlations for descriptions of the detection of transient signals from CBC and apply these methods to calculate the two-point intensity correlations for the GW discovery. We also discuss the necessary theoretical work required for the description of the quantum gravito-optics of intensity correlations in the detection of signals from binary inspirals.