<B>Special LIGO Collaboration Seminar</B><br><i> LIGO and the LOOC UP Project</i>

Speakers: Laura K. Nuttall &amp; Darren White (School of Physics/Astronomy, Cardiff University (United Kingdom)

The kilometer scale gravitational wave detectors in the US have in recent months finished taking data and are now undergoing improvements for the advanced detector era (c. 2015). There are many sources of gravitational waves which are expected to produce an electromagnetic counterpart, such as the merger of double neutron-star or neutron-star black-hole binaries, supernovae, and gamma-ray bursts. Capturing an EM counterpart of a GW signal would yield valuable astrophysical information. It could also be critical for confirming a GW candidate, particularly for the case where we lack an accurate model for the GW signal itself. During the last science run the LOOC UP (locating and observing optical transients to unmodelled pulses) team made prompt follow-up observations of reconstructed sky locations of GW candidates. This talk will focus on the work done by the LOOC UP project as well as a discussion of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory).