Eric Thrane

I am a postdoc working on the LIGO experiment. My recent work includes searching for an anisotropic stochastic gravitational-wave background, looking for intermediate-duration gravitational-wave transients, and managing LIGO's hardware injections. My interests include astrophysics, cosmology, gravitational waves, and neutrinos. My CV and a list of publications are available on my website.

Previous Employment
PhD student at the University of Washington in the
department of physics, 2003-2008.

Awards
Ken Young Fellow, 2003
LIGO Visiting Scientist, 2008-2009

Sources of and searches for gravitational waves. With the construction of the second generation "advanced" gravitational-wave detectors, we are poised to enter a new era of gravitational-wave astronomy. Using data from the LIGO and Virgo observatories, I look for signatures for a
stochastic gravitational-wave background as well as long
gravitational-wave transients (lasting >1s). The stochastic
gravitational-wave background may be one of our only probes of early
universe physics at energy scales inaccessible to laboratory experiments. Long gravitational-wave transients, meanwhile, provide a unique tool to probe phenomena such as the first few moments of a newborn neutron star.