Project Grant 2607927

The National Science Foundation Division of Physics awarded California Institute of Technology $500,000 on August 1, 2026, under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) to theoretically improve LIGO's ability to extract information from observed gravitational waves and to enhance interpretation of LIGO events accompanied by simultaneous detections from other instruments such as neutrino detectors and optical, gamma-ray, and radio telescopes.

The award funds development of state-of-the-art methods for computing predicted gravitational wave signals from general relativity, including new cases such as black holes with large spins and eccentric orbits and hard-to-compute physical effects like gravitational-wave memory. The project will build fast approximate models capable of computing gravitational wave signals in milliseconds rather than months and will compute signals using beyond-Einstein theories of gravity to enable tests of gravity by LIGO. The award supports postdoctoral researchers and graduate students receiving crossdisciplinary training in computational modeling and physics and astronomy, with computational techniques applicable to fluid dynamics, meteorology, seismology, and astrophysics.

Work is performed at Caltech in Pasadena, California, with a period of performance from August 1, 2026, through July 31, 2028. The funding was obligated in full at award.