Three hundred scientists from sixteen countries convene at the 8th International LISA Symposium

Between June 28 and July 2, progress in LISA science and technology was in the spotlight at the conference held at Stanford

The LISA8 symposium participants.

The Eighth International LISA Symposium was held on the SLAC campus of Stanford University from June 28 to July 2, 2010, and was attended by 301 registered participants (see the group image) from 16 countries; more than half of them were students and young researchers. LISA is the planned NASA--ESA space mission to detect low-frequency gravitational waves by using laser interferometry to monitor the relative displacements of three spacecraft flying in a 5-million-km-wide triangular configuration.

The Symposium emphasized the scientific opportunities and technological challenges of gravitational-wave detection in space, but it also covered more general topics such as ground-based gravitational-wave astronomy, and the physics of the black holes in galactic nuclei. The scientific program included 50 invited talks, 37 contributed talks, and 83 posters, as well as a public talk by Prof. Bernard Schutz of the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam ("Gravitational Waves: Listening to the True Music of the Spheres") and an after-dinner talk by Stanford professor Sigrid Close ("From Dust to Asteroids: Impacts on Earth").

LISA-related sessions focused on the mission, science objectives and perspectives, demonstrated LISA technology and possible enhancements, data-analysis development, and more. Several sessions emphasized the depth and breadth of technology and data-analysis efforts for the upcoming LISA Pathfinder, a LISA technology demonstrator scheduled to launch by 2013. Other sessions covered galactic astrophysics, numerical relativity, and cosmology, as well as status reports from ground detectors, and the history, prospects, and technology of other space missions to measure gravitational waves and test gravitation.

Among the highlights were several talks and posters about electromagnetic counterparts to the mergers of massive black holes (e.g., by Tamara Bogdanovic, Luis Lehner, Nate Bode, and Jeremy Schnittman); Jonathan Gair (as well as Plowman, Hellings, and Tsuruta) showed that LISA detections of massive black-hole mergers can distinguish between different models of black-hole evolution, while detections of extreme-mass-ratio inspirals can constrain the black-hole mass function. As for LISA technology, Roland Fleddermann reported on the first measurement of non-reciprocal phase noise in the optical fibers that connect the two optical benches on the same LISA spacecraft; Andrew Sutton discussed the recent demonstration of cm-level inter-spacecraft ranging without affecting interferometric sensitivity.

In her opening-session talk, Joan Centrella commented on how much richer the science case for LISA has become over the last ten years (e.g., with the first groundbreaking simulations of black-hole mergers in numerical relativity). On the experimental side, a similar story could be made that what were once novel measurement concepts are now reliable, proven technologies (e.g., with the recent testbed demonstration of time-delay interferometry).

All invited papers are scheduled to appear in the special March 2011 issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity; other contributions will be published in the Journal of Physics, Conference Series. Complete information can be found on the Symposium website. For more about LISA, see lisa.nasa.gov and this very site.

The Symposium was kindly supported by SLAC in Stanford (for the venue), by the NSF (for student travel grants), by the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam and by NASA (for publication costs), and it was sponsored by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), by Saudi ArabiaÕs King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), by EADS Astrium GmbH in Friedrichshafen, Germany, by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and by the Dean of Research, the Physics and Applied Physics departments, and the Ginzton and HEPL laboratories at Stanford University.