On Wednesday evening we are excited to offer a talk by Dr Riccardo Bassiri, Research Scientist at Stanford University and LIGO, followed by Kai Staats' 3rd movie in his LIGO series: LIGO Detection. Both Riccardo and Kai are members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and will be pleased to answer questions about gravitational wave research and multi-messenger astronomy following the screening. (Kai will join us online through skype)
The Tap Haus is a German style beer hall, pool hall and restaurant located in the Telegraph district of Berkeley just steps from the UC Berkeley campus
21+ event
On September 14, 2015 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (LIGO) measured ripples in the fabric of spacetime — gravitational waves — generated by the merger of two massive black holes over one billion light years from Earth. What does it mean to make such an extraordinary claim? In his 3rd film about LIGO, Staats investigates what unfolded between the detection on September 14 and February 11, 2016 when LIGO announced this to the world.
Kai Staats
Filmmaker, writer, researcher
Kai Staats is an award winning filmmaker, writer, and researcher. Kai was awarded his MSc in Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, his research in the application of machine learning to the mitigation of human-generated noise in radio astronomy data at the Square Kilometre Array, South Africa. He is a visiting scientist at LIGO and a project lead at Arizona State University where his team is developing a mathematical model of a scalable Mars community.
Riccardo Bassiri
Deputy Director, LIGO Scientific Collaboration Center
A Research Scientist at Stanford University, Riccardo co-ordinates the materials research efforts of the Stanford LIGO group. He is also Deputy Director of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration Center for Coatings Research, which is a collaborative project involving 10 US institutions that seeks to extend the reach of the next generation of gravitational wave detectors by addressing the dominant noise source limiting their performance, thermal noise in the interferometer mirrors.
Dr Bassiri holds an Honorary Research Fellow position at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He obtained his research doctorate from the University of Glasgow in 2011, with his thesis The Atomic Structure and Properties of Mirror Coatings for use in Gravitational Wave Detectors.