Gravitational lensing effects on parameter estimation in gravitational wave detection with advanced detectors
The gravitational lensing effect is important to the detection of electromagnetic signals in astrophysics. The gravitational wave lensing effect has also been found significant to gravitational wave detection in the past decade. Recent analysis shows that the lensing events for advanced detectors could be quite plausible. The black holes in our Milky Way Galaxy may play the role of lens objects. These facts motivate us to study the lensing effects on gravitational wave signals for advanced detectors. Taking advanced LIGO and Einstein Telescope for examples, we investigate the lensing effects on the parameter extraction of gravitational wave signals. Using the Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation together with matched filtering methods, we find that the lensing effect for a lens object with small mass is negligible. But when the mass of the lens object increases to larger than 1000M(circle dot) the lensing effect becomes important. Using the template without lensing corrections would result in loss of signal detections. In contrast if we consider templates with lensing effects, the lensed signal may provide much information about the lens black hole. These facts may give us a new way to determine the parameters of the lensing object. For example, this kind of signal may also help us estimate the mass and the distance of the supermassive black hole hosted at the center of our Galaxy.

title: A scientific case study of an advanced LISA mission
abstract: A brief status report of an ongoing scientific case study of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Antenna (ALIA) mission is presented. Key technology requirements and primary science objectives of the mission are covered in the study. Possible descope options for the mission and the corresponding compromise in science are also considered and compared. Our preliminary study indicates that ALIA holds promise in mapping out the mass and spin distribution of intermediate mass black holes possibly present in dense star clusters at low redshift as well as in shedding important light on the structure formation in the early Universe.

title: First stage of LISA data processing: Clock synchronization and arm-length determination via a hybrid-extended Kalman filter
abstract: In this paper, we describe a hybrid-extended Kalman filter algorithm to synchronize the clocks and to precisely determine the inter-spacecraft distances for space-based gravitational wave detectors, such as (e)LISA. According to the simulation, the algorithm has significantly improved the ranging accuracy and synchronized the clocks, making the phase-meter raw measurements qualified for time- delay interferometry algorithms.

title: Quantum Wave Equation of Photon
abstract: In this paper, we give the quantum wave equations of single photon when it is in the vacuum and medium. With these wave equations, we can study light interference and diffraction with the approach of quantum theory, and also can study the quantum property of photon when it is in a general crystal and photonic crystal. Otherwise, it can be applied in quantum optics and condensed matter feld.

title: The Mock LISA data challenges: from challenge 1B to challenge 3
abstract: The Mock LISA Data Challenges are a programme to demonstrate and encourage the development of LISA data-analysis capabilities, tools and techniques. At the time of this workshop, three rounds of challenges had been completed, and the next was about to start. In this paper we provide a critical analysis of the entries to the latest completed round, Challenge 1B. The entries confirm the consolidation of a range of data-analysis techniques for galactic and massive-black-hole binaries, and they include the first convincing examples of detection and parameter estimation of extreme-mass-ratio inspiral sources. In this paper we also introduce the next round, Challenge 3. Its data sets feature more realistic waveform models (e.g., galactic binaries may now chirp, and massive-black-hole binaries may precess due to spin interactions), as well as new source classes (bursts from cosmic strings, isotropic stochastic backgrounds) and more complicated nonsymmetric instrument noise.

title: EMRI data analysis with a phenomenological waveform
abstract: Extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs) (capture and inspiral of a compact stellar mass object into a Massive Black Hole (MBH)) are among the most interesting objects for the gravitational wave astronomy. It is a very challenging task to detect those sources with the accurate estimation parameters of binaries primarily due to a large number of the secondary maxima on the likelihood surface. Search algorithms based on the matched filtering require computation of the gravitational waveform hundreds of thousands of times, which is currently not feasible with the most accurate (faithful) models of EMRIs. Here we propose to use a phenomenological template family which covers a large range of EMRIs parameter space. We use these phenomenological templates to detect the signal in the simulated data and then, assuming a particular EMRI model, estimate the physical parameters of the binary. We have separated the detection problem, which is done in a model-independent way, from the parameter estimation. For the latter one, we need to adopt the model for inspiral in order to map phenomenological parameters onto the physical parameter characterizing EMRIs.

title: Statistics of Extreme Gravitational Lensing Events. I.The Zero Shear Case
abstract: We consider an astrophysical system with a population of sources and a population of lenses. For each pair of source and lens, there is a thin on-axis tube-like volume behind the lens in which the radiation flux from the source is greatly increased due to gravitational lensing. Any objects (such as dust grains) which pass through such a thin tube will experience strong bursts of radiation, i.e., Extreme Gravitational Lensing Events (EGLE). We study the physics and statistics of EGLE for the case in which the shear is larger or comparable to the finite source size. We find that the presence of shear has only a small effect on the EGLE statistics.

title: Primordial power spectrum reconstruction
abstract: In order to reconstruct the initial conditions of the universe it is important to devise a method that can efficiently constrain the shape of the power spectrum of primordial matter density fluctuations in a model-independent way from data. In an earlier paper we proposed a method based on the wavelet expansion of the primordial power spectrum. The advantage of this method is that the orthogonality and multiresolution properties of wavelet basis functions enable information regarding the shape of Pin(k) to be encoded in a small number of non-zero coefficients. Any deviation from scale invariance can then be easily picked out. Here we apply this method to simulated data to demonstrate that it can accurately reconstruct an input Pin(k), and present a prescription for how this method should be used on future data.

title: Cosmological constant and advanced gravitational wave detectors
abstract: Interferometric gravitational wave detectors could measure the frequency sweep of a binary inspiral (characterized by its chirp mass) to high accuracy. The observed chirp mass is the intrinsic chirp mass of the binary source multiplied by (1+z), where z is the redshift of the source. Assuming a nonzero cosmological constant, we compute the expected redshift distribution of observed events for an advanced LIGO detector. We find that the redshift distribution has a robust and sizable dependence on the cosmological constant; the data from advanced LIGO detectors could provide an independent measurement of the cosmological constant.

title: The ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC
abstract: ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is a general-purpose, heavy-ion detector at the CERN LHC which focuses on QCD, the strong-interaction sector of the Standard Model. It is designed to address the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark-gluon plasma at extreme values of energy density and temperature in nucleus-nucleus collisions. Besides running with Pb ions, the physics programme includes collisions with lighter ions, lower energy running and dedicated proton-nucleus runs. ALICE will also take data with proton beams at the top LHC energy to collect reference data for the heavy-ion programme and to address several QCD topics for which ALICE is complementary to the other LHC detectors. The ALICE detector has been built by a collaboration including currently over 1000 physicists and engineers from 105 Institutes in 30 countries. Its overall dimensions are 161626 m3 with a total weight of approximately 10 000 t. The experiment consists of 18 different detector systems each with its own specific technology choice and design constraints, driven both by the physics requirements and the experimental conditions expected at LHC. The most stringent design constraint is to cope with the extreme particle multiplicity anticipated in central Pb-Pb collisions. The different subsystems were optimized to provide high-momentum resolution as well as excellent Particle Identification (PID) over a broad range in momentum, up to the highest multiplicities predicted for LHC. This will allow for comprehensive studies of hadrons, electrons, muons, and photons produced in the collision of heavy nuclei. Most detector systems are scheduled to be installed and ready for data taking by mid-2008 when the LHC is scheduled to start operation, with the exception of parts of the Photon Spectrometer (PHOS), Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) and Electro Magnetic Calorimeter (EMCal). These detectors will be completed for the high-luminosity ion run expected in 2010. This paper describes in detail the detector components as installed for the first data taking in the summer of 2008.

title: Linear growth of entanglement entropy in holographic thermalization captured by horizon interiors and mutual information
abstract: A bstractWe study the holographic entanglement entropy in a homogeneous falling shell background, which is dual to the strongly coupled field theory following a global quench. For d=2 conformal field theories, it is known that the entropy has a linear growth regime if the scale of the entangling region is large. In addition, the growth rate approaches a constant when the scale increases. We demonstrate analytically that this behavior is directly related to the part of minimal area surface probing the interior of apparent horizons in the bulk, as well as the mutual information between two disjoint rectangular subsystems in the boundary. Furthermore, we show numerically that all the results are universal for the d=3 conformal field theory, the non-relativistic scale-invariant theory and the dual theory of Gauss-Bonnet gravity.