Sebastian Ellis (University of Geneva)

Classical and Quantum Detection of Gravitational Waves

There are many reasons to hope for the further detection of gravitational waves, especially from non-astrophysical sources. In particular, detecting cosmogenic gravitational waves could be our best hope of probing theories in the far UV with Earth-bound detectors. We will discuss how the detection of gravitational waves can be understood using simple heuristics. These will enable us to derive best-case scenarios for a variety of real and hypothetical detector technologies. We will see that quantum states will almost certainly be necessary to detect the most interesting gravitational wave searches, further motivating the development of quantum sensors.