This award supports participation in the 8th International LISA Symposium to be held at Stanford University in June 2010. The Symposium focuses on various aspects of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), the NASA / European Space Agency space-based gravitational wave detection and observation project, expected to complement the NSF-funded ground-based gravitational wave observatory, LIGO, and other ground-based gravitational wave detectors. The Conference will include LISA Technology and Design, Astronomy/Astrophysics with LISA, Cosmology/Fundamental Physics with LISA, Data Analysis and simulations, LISA PathFinder, and ground-based and other space-based detectors. Plenary talks, contributed talks organized in two parallel sessions, and posters will be presented during the Symposium. The presentations will be collected in the Conference Proceedings to be published in a reviewed journal.
LISA will be the space-based partner of NSF’s ground based gravitational wave observatory which is known as LIGO. Operating in space, LISA will not be exposed to seismic noise which limits LIGO’s sensitivity at low frequencies, and it will thus open up an important part of the gravitational wave spectrum that has not yet been accessible. LISA, still in the planning stage, is being developed by an international collaboration of partnering institutions which hold periodic symposia for this purpose. Eighteen different countries were represented at the 8th International LISA Symposium held at SLAC on the Stanford University campus in June 2010. Throughout the 6 day symposium there were 376 registered participants, 92 of which were international Ph.D. candidate students, and 108 local Ph.D. candidate students. Partial support from NSF was used for 50% of the international students' travel and 50% for domestic students' travel (including Canada). NSF funds provided meals and transportation (SLAC is not on the main Stanford Campus) for 30 summer high school students and their 9 teachers who were participating in the Stanford Office of Science Outreach Office's Summer Science Program. There were invited guests such as the Director of SLAC, Final Report: 1005662 Director of Physics, Stanford Dean of Research and Vice Provost, and many faculty members from Stanford, Berkeley, and Caltech. The symposium provided an avenue for students and invited speakers to present their up-to-the-minute results on their research for their LISA projects. All told there was an estimate of 550 participants of the week long symposium.
