2025 Gabriela González

2025 Ta-You Wu Lecture
in Physics

Gabriela González, Boyd Professor of Physics (Louisiana State University)

Einstein, Gravitational Waves, Black Holes and Other Matters

More than a hundred years ago, Einstein predicted that there were ripples in the fabric of space-time traveling at the speed of light: gravitational waves. On September 14, 2015, the LIGO detectors in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana in the US registered for the first time ever a loud gravitational wave signal traveling through Earth, created more than a billion years ago by the merger of two black holes. A spectacular signal was detected by LIGO and the Virgo detector in Europe in 2017, produced by the collision of two neutron stars, giving birth to a black hole, generating also electromagnetic waves (light!) detected by many telescopes and helping us understand the origin of gold. In only a few years from the first detection, there are now hundreds of new signals from mergers of black holes and/or neutron stars - this is the era of gravitational wave astronomy. We will describe the history and details of the observations, and the gravity-bright future of the field.

The lecture was Wednesday, October 8, 2025
4:00-5:00 PM in the Rackham Amphitheatre (4th Floor)
University of Michigan Ann Arbor Campus

Biography
Professor González research interest is in the detection of gravitational waves with interferometric detectors, such as the one in the LIGO Livingston Observatory, in Livingston, LA. She has published several papers on the specific predictions of Brownian motion as a limiting sources to the detectors' sensitivity. She was a founding member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and has participated intensely in the commissioning of the LIGO detector at the Livingston Observatory since joining LSU in 2001, in issues related to alignment sensing and control. Her group is very involved in the instrumental characterization and calibration of the data collected in the data-taking Science Runs performed by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). From 2000 to 2007, she co-led one of the four data analysis groups in the Collaboration, dedicated to the search of gravitational waves generated by binary systems of compact objects (neutron stars or black holes) in the final inspiraling stage before coalescence. In 2008-2011, she led the LSc detector characterization working group. In 2011, she was elected as the LSC spokesperson.