MG11 
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LISA and Multi-Messenger Astronomy

LISA will observe the gravitational wave emission from the merger of supermassive black holes following distant galactic mergers, the capture of compact stars about intermediate and supermassive black holes, and millions of galactic white dwarf binary systems. While taken alone these observations will provide a wealth of information not otherwise available, the greater prize is the synergy that will come when they are combined with electromagnetic observations of the same phenomena, leading to an observational understanding of the cosmos far greater than the simple sum of the the observational parts. Here we discuss LISA gravitational wave observations in the context of this broader astronomical mission of discovery, embracing everything from accretion in stellar binaries to the formation of large scale structure in the universe.

Drawing Astrophysical Conclusions from Gravitational Wave Burst Searches

The results from searches for gravitational wave bursts are traditionally presented in terms of an upper limit on the rate of bursts assuming that all are of a given strength (and sometimes polarization) at the detector. This detector-centric interpretation of the observations fails to confront the astrophysical questions that such observations can address. Here we describe how searches for gravitational wave bursts can be analyzed to make statements about the astrophysical nature of gravitational wave bursts sources.

Waveforms from gravitational wave bursts: A Maximum Entropy Approach

The detection of a gravitational wave burst leads inevitably to the question of the nature of the source itself. For this purpose, the actual structure of the burst - i.e., its waveform - is indispensable. The reconstruction of the waveform from detector observations is, however, fraught with challenges as many different waveforms may lead to the same noisy response of a given detector or detector network. Here we describe how the principle of maximum (information theoretic) entropy allows the determination of the most probable incident gravitational wave signal given the response of one or more gravitational wave detectors.