A long-term collaboration to integrate research and education will be formed between the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). This collaboration will incorporate four faculty members and approximately ten students from UTB, and staff scientists and engineers from LIGO laboratory. Research activities will focus on three main areas related to gravitational wave data analysis: (i) software development for detector characterization, (ii) software development for gravitational wave detection, and (iii) construction of a distributed processing environment to analyze gravitational wave data. Students from UTB will spend approximately ten weeks each summer at the LIGO observatory in Livingston, LA where they will install and test software developed at UTB. Enhancements to education will consist of two new graduate-level courses and four new undergraduate courses/modules, which will integrate the research activities into the curriculum.
The activities listed above are important for a variety of reasons. The LIGO interferometers will soon be joined by similar gravitational wave interferometers and several resonant bar detectors located in the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia. This world-wide network of gravitational wave detectors will open a new window onto the universe, allowing physicists to understand better the nature of strong gravitational fields and astronomers to "see" objects and catastrophic astrophysical events that cannot be studied by more traditional electromagnetic-based astronomy. The commissioning of the LIGO interferometers is scheduled for the year 2000, and a two year science-data run is planned for the end of 2002. Thus, it is essential for the success of LIGO and the world-wide network of detectors that software for analyzing the performance of gravitational wave detectors and for searching for astrophysical sources must be developed and tested within the next two or three years. The addition of new courses at UTB and the opportunity for students to spend time at the LIGO observatory should attract more students into science and engineering, and consequently increase the number of minority students graduating with science-related degrees.
