Introduction to Research Seminar

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has built three multi-km interferometers designed to search for gravitational waves. LIGO has reached its design sensitivity, and the first year-long run is expected to end on October 1, 2007. The data from this run will be thoroughly searched in the coming years for different sources of gravitational radiation. At the same time, detector upgrades will be commissioned with the goal of improving interferometer sensitivity by a factor of 10 and of increasing the sensitive frequency band of the interferometers. We will review the current status of LIGO and the expected future improvements, as well as the most recent results of the search for stochastic gravitational-wave background.