The Origins of Black Hole Mergers and Gravitational Waves

Moore's Law is dead.  The future of astrophysics will require increasingly clever problem-solving techniques, as computationally-intensive methods fail to be able to simulate large-scale statistical problems efficiently.  In other words, the future of our field will rely heavily on the development of efficient, high-quality and often specialized software packages, and will no longer be able to rely on rapid increases in machine computing power.  In this worksop, we will hear from experts on gravitational wave (GW) mergers and their detections, as well as of their progenitor stellar and black hole (BH) binaries; the meeting is timely, since LIGO will have shattered (by an order of magnitude) its previous sample size of GW merger detections by the end of the year.  This will inform and guide the efforts of theorists in developing more robust, modular and efficient software packages that are directly applicable to a variety of astrophysical problems, motivated by future observations.  Thus, this workshop is aimed at bringing together the world’s leading experts in both observations of GW detections and the theoretical models used to compute their predicted rates.  This will provide the ideal environment for theorists and observers to educate each other and form new collaborations, as they attempt to re-invent the computational future of this rapidly growing sub-field.