Welcome to the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics at The Pennsylvania State University.

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The forthcoming generation of ground and space-based gravitational wave detectors have unleashed exciting challenges and opportunities at the interface of general relativity, astrophysics and experimental physics. The waves they will detect arise in strong, dynamical gravitational fields, offering the first opportunities to test our understanding of fully nonlinear relativistic gravity. Simultaneously, the observations' astrophysical implications are likely to be novel, diverse, and rich as they reveal the inner dynamics of processes hidden from electromagnetic astronomy: e.g., the collision of black holes in the center of a galaxy at high redshift.

The Center for Gravitational Wave Physics, recently established by the National Science Foundation as part of its Physics Frontier Center program, is dedicated to bridging the gap between gravitational wave theory and observations.

Research at the Center focuses on interdisciplinary problems at the interface of general relativity, gravitational waves, astrophysics and detector design:

• Astrophysics and gravitational waves includes, but is not limited to, problems of source calculations, astrophysical modeling of sources and their populations, and interpretation of observations,
• General relativity and gravitational waves includes, but is not limited to, testing relativity and developing numerical and analytic tools needed for detailed studies of sources (e.g., numerical relativity and radiation reaction),
• Detector design studies will focus particularly on how target science - the sources one wants to detect or the science one wants to do - constructively influences the design of advanced gravitational wave detectors.

See also The Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry