David Reitze 
Professor | University of Florida
Gainesville, FL, UNITED STATES
David Reitze’s research interests include femtosecond lasers and their interactions with matter gravitational-wave interferometry.
Biography
David Reitze’s research interests include femtosecond lasers and their interactions with matter, femtosecond pulse shaping, quantum control, gravitational-wave interferometry, and optical coherence tomography.
Areas of Expertise (3)
Gravitational Waves
LIGO
Astrophyics
Media Appearances (5)
European plan for gigantic new gravitational wave detector passes milestone
Science online
2021-07-02
U.S. gravitational wave physicists welcomed the announcement, too, as they think it may bolster their plans to build a pair of detectors even bigger than the Einstein Telescope in a project called Cosmic Explorer. “In the U.S., I think the momentum is going to start to build,” says David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and a physicist at the California Institute of Technology.
Veronika Tait: The scientific method will help us solve our problems
The Salt Lake Tribune online
2021-04-29
From left, Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Exectutive Director David Reitze, LIGO Scientific Collaboration Spokesperson Gabriela Gonzalez, and Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Co-Founders Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne, appear next to a visual of gravitational waves from two converging black holes during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016, to announce that scientists they have finally detected gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. The announcement has electrified the world of astronomy, and some have likened the breakthrough to the moment Galileo took up a telescope to look at the planets.
Giant gravitational wave detectors could hear murmurs from across universe
Science online
2021-03-10
“Right now, we’re only catching the rarest, loudest events, but there’s a whole lot more, murmuring through the universe,” says Jocelyn Read, an astrophysicist at California State University, Fullerton, who’s working on the U.S. effort. Physicists hope to have the new detectors running in the 2030s, which means they have to start planning now, says David Reitze, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). “Gravitational wave discoveries have captivated the world, so now is a great time to be thinking about what comes next.”
The incredible story of how teaming up helped astronomers accomplish the impossible
Inverse online
2020-11-05
Weber’s false alarm turned out to be only one of the many that would follow over the years. “So, the field actually got started in a somewhat awkward way,” laughs David Reitze, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of Florida.
Nobel Prize favourite David Reitze wants gravitational wave detector for Australia
The Sydney Morning Herald online
2017-04-13
It's not every day you get to sit down with a bloke who is tipped as "guaranteed" to win the Nobel Prize for physics this year. David Reitze and his team of a thousand scientists last year announced they had found gravitational waves, the last unproven prediction emerging from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Articles (5)
Observation of Gravitational Waves from Two Neutron Star–Black Hole Coalescences
The Astrophysical Journal LettersR. Abbott, et al.
2021-06-29
We report the observation of gravitational waves from two compact binary coalescences in LIGO's and Virgo's third observing run with properties consistent with neutron star–black hole (NSBH) binaries. The two events are named GW200105_162426 and GW200115_042309, abbreviated as GW200105 and GW200115; the first was observed by LIGO Livingston and Virgo and the second by all three LIGO–Virgo detectors.
Constraints on Cosmic Strings Using Data from the Third Advanced LIGO–Virgo Observing Run
Physical Review LettersR. Abbott, et al.
2021-06-16
We search for gravitational-wave signals produced by cosmic strings in the Advanced LIGO and Virgo full O3 dataset. Search results are presented for gravitational waves produced by cosmic string loop features such as cusps, kinks, and, for the first time, kink-kink collisions. A template-based search for short-duration transient signals does not yield a detection.
Tests of general relativity with binary black holes from the second LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalog
Physical Review DR. Abbott, et al.
2021-06-15
Gravitational waves enable tests of general relativity in the highly dynamical and strong-field regime. Using events detected by LIGO-Virgo up to 1 October 2019, we evaluate the consistency of the data with predictions from the theory. We first establish that residuals from the best-fit waveform are consistent with detector noise, and that the low- and high-frequency parts of the signals are in agreement.
GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First Half of the Third Observing Run
Physical Review XR. Abbott, et al.
2021-06-09
We report on gravitational-wave discoveries from compact binary coalescences detected by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo in the first half of the third observing run (O3a) between 1 April 2019 15 ∶ 00 UTC and 1 October 2019 15 ∶ 00 UTC. By imposing a false-alarm-rate threshold of two per year in each of the four search pipelines that constitute our search, we present 39 candidate gravitational-wave events. At this threshold, we expect a contamination fraction of less than 10%.
Population Properties of Compact Objects from the Second LIGO–Virgo Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
The Astrophysical Journal LettersR. Abbott, et al.
2021-05-19
We report on the population of 47 compact binary mergers detected with a false-alarm rate of false-alarm rate of
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Languages (2)
- English
- French
Affiliations (3)
- American Physical Society : Member
- Optical Society of America : Member
- National High Magnetic Field Laboratory : Member
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