9417348 Thorne This award supports a two-year cooperative research project between Dr. Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology and Professor Takashi Nakamura of Kyoto University. This research is in support of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Project and of the corresponding interferometric gravitational-wave-detection project in Japan: theorists need to compute, from general relativity, the gravitational waveforms produced by such binaries for use as templates in the analysis of the interferometer data. The Caltech group has great expertise in what types of calculations need to be done and how to relate the results of those calculations to the planned observations; Caltech also has moderate expertise in the calculational techniques. The Kyoto group has greater expertise and experience than the Caltech group in two of the principal calculational techniques: the theory of perturbations of massive black holes, and numerical simulations of the final coalescence. By combining these expertises, the two groups can achieve a deeper understanding and more rapid progress than can either group alone. ***
