Dr. Frederick Jenet, at the University of Texas at Brownsville, will undertake a program to detect and characterize gravitational waves using observations of radio pulsars, while building a research group at the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy that will develop the needed techniques to detect them. The purpose of the program is to verify our basic understanding of physics and give us a new tool to study the universe. Dr. Jenet will develop a gravitational wave detector based on pulsar timing techniques, to complement current and proposed ground- and spacecraft-based gravitational wave observatories like LIGO and LISA.
Dr. Jenet will also lead the development of the Arecibo Remote Command Center (ARCC 1), to allow high school, undergraduate, and graduate students to work in teams to perform observations of radio pulsars. The students will then use the data both to search for low-frequency gravitational waves and to place constraints on the population of super-massive black hole binary systems. A partnership between the University of Texas at Brownsville, the Australia Telescope National Facility, and European groups will be established to foster the sharing of data and cross-fertilization of ideas, and provide students with the opportunity to work with researchers throughout the world.
This award is co-funded by the NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities.
One of the challenges facing us as a nation is to inspire the next generation to pursue careers in science and technical fields. This award created a model program, the Arecibo Remote Command Center, that allows students, from the high school level and higher, to be actively involved in meaningful research. Students in the ARCC program have discovered over 40 exotic stars known as radio pulsars. Several of these newly discovered objects may be suitable to be included in a global effort to detect and study low frequency gravitational waves using radio pulsars. Together with these discoveries, students in the ARCC program have developed new ways to search for pulsars, determined the effects a black hole would have on the measured time-of-arrival of pulses from radio pulsars, and determined the effects of alternative theories of gravity on pulsar timing observations. The ARCC students were also the first to observe the effect of anomalous dispersion in an astrophysical setting. This effect causes pulses emitted by a pulsar to appear to travel faster than the vacuum speed of light. Each of our graduates has written a thesis, as will all future graduates; every student has, or will have, a chance to present at a national meeting; every student will have the experience of being in a leadership role. The ARCC program itself is now one of the nation’s top producers of Hispanic physics graduates. The program is graduating underrepresented, first generation American, minority students in four years and all program graduates are now in Astrophysics programs pursuing higher degrees.
