What is involved in gravitational wave research?

[binbagsss]

A professor from a UK university who is a member of LIGO kindly video called me the other day regarding potential PhD projects and said that a lot of gravitational research isn't about the dynamics and source-model nor application of general relativity but high performance computation and big data management; and that often minimal assumptions are made on the waveform since most objects are very unpredictable, an exemption for e.g being binary black holes.

I am just wondering whether anyone else can give me more guidance on what is generally involved in a gravitational wave research department; in particular the side that doesn't involve dynamics, predicted wave-forms or application of general relativity. What sorts of things are involved in the analysing gravitational wave data?

Many thanks in advance,

Apologies if the above doesn't make sense in some places.

 

[jedishrfu]

This may be a shot in the dark but I tried to search on it and found these references:

http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/igr/index.php?L1=research&L2=data

and some arxiv articles and scholarly papers:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?...ved=0ahUKEwjXvcaY1K_TAhUJ64MKHcUDDjoQgQMILzAA

and some articles about the distribution of LIGO data and the subsequent analysis:

http://uwm.edu/news/uwms-big-data-helps-find-gravitational-waves/

and a book published in 2009:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521864593/?tag=pfamazon01-20

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academi...tional-wave-data?format=HB&isbn=9780521864596

and this page with a list of related and ongoing projects in gravitational research:

http://www.physics.uwa.edu.au/research/international-gravitational

and another arxiv paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05573

You might find something to followup in this stuff or to give you an idea of what data analysis tools are used.

You could also research some of the modern data analysis tools like iPython with numpy, scipy... or Apache Spark with Machine Learning or Julia and other related variants although I don't know if these types of private sector tools are being used in academic research.