Speaker
Description
The moon offers unique opportunities and challenges to realize interferometric gravitational wave detectors that are sensitive over a range of frequencies that is currently not covered. Compared with Earth-based detectors, the moon’s reduced gravity and lower seismic activity allow us to shift the sensitivity to lower frequencies.
In this talk, we will provide an update on the Laser Interferometer Lunar Antenna (LILA) project—a next generation gravitational-wave detector on the surface of the Moon. The LILA detector will have unique access to sub-Hertz frequencies of gravitational waves. This frequency range of waves cannot be measured by any ongoing or upcoming experiment on the Earth or in space, thus fundamentally changing the landscape of multi-messenger astrophysics that otherwise cannot be achieved. LILA will provide early warning up to years prior to mergers of black holes and neutron stars, thus vastly improving measurements of the Hubble constant, the equation of state of neutron stars, and tests of General Relativity. Furthermore, LILA will uniquely observe phenomena like white dwarf mergers as Type Ia supernovae progenitors, tidal disruption around intermediate mass black holes, and novel dark matter probes. We will show a preliminary design for the LILA project and the planned future development stages: LILA Foundation, LILA Pioneer and LILA Horizon.