George F. Smoot: Gravitational Waves, Merging Black Holes and Merging Binary Neutron Stars
Colloquia
- Speaker
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George F. Smoot
Physics Department and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, USA - When
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2019/05/16
12:00 - Place
- DIPC
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Physics Department and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Institute for Advanced Study, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
Energetic Cosmos Laboratory, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan
Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France
This talk will provide a historical review of Gravitational Wave Astronomy up to the new LIGO run which started in April 2019.
Prof. Smoot's web page
Wikipedia article
About the speaker
Prof. George F. Smoot is an US-American astrophysicist and cosmologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006, jointly with Prof John Mather, for their work on the COBE satellite that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". This work provided strong evidence for the Big Bang theory and Inflationary Cosmology.
Smoot obtained his PhD at MIT in particle physics and in 1970 joined the University of California at Berkeley as a postdoc in Luis Alvarez' group. He has been at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory ever since, since 1994 as full professor. Besides his work with COBE, where he was responsible for the central instrument to detect small anisotropies in the radiation, he has been involved in other high-profile experiments exploring cosmological questions such as the PLANCK satellite mission (CMB) or the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.