Gravitational Wave Astronomy

This is the webpage for the course that I am giving to graduate students at the Institute of Astronomy and at the Cavendish this term (February-March 2008). The lecture notes can be downloaded below, and I will also add movies and other bits and pieces as the course progresses.

Lecture notes

  • Lecture 1 - Introduction, History and heuristic derivation of Gravitational Wave properties
  • Lecture 2 - Mathematical Theory of Gravitational Waves
  • Lecture 3 - Principles of Detection and Signal Analysis
  • Lecture 4 - Gravitational Wave Detectors I
  • Lecture 5 - Gravitational Wave Detectors II
  • Lecture 6 - Gravitational Wave Sources I (Cosmological, Bursts, Neutron Stars, Wide Compact Binaries)
  • Lecture 7 - Gravitational Wave Sources II (Comparable Mass Compact Binary Inspirals)
  • Lecture 8 - Gravitational Wave Sources III (Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals)

    • Other Material

    Useful Books

  • Dirac, P A M, 1975, General Theory of Relativity, (New York: Wiley)
  • Landau, L D and Lifshitz, E M, 1975, The Classical Theory of Fields, fourth edition, (Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann)
  • Misner, C W, Thorne, K S and Wheeler, J A, 1973, Gravitation (New York: Freeman)
  • Wald, R M, 1984, General Relativity, (Chicago: University Press)

    • Useful Papers

  • Schutz, B F, Gravitational Waves on the back of an envelope, Am. J. Phys. 52, 412 (1984).

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