Workshop on Gravitational Waves and High Energy Neutrinos

The first Gravitational Wave + High-Energy Neutrino (GW+HEN) Workshop was organized by the Laboratoire AstroParticule et Cosmologie (APC) (location) in Paris (France) at Université Paris Denis Diderot May 18th - 20th, 2009.

This workshop gathered the scientific communities contributing to the major gravitational-wave (GW) and high-energy neutrino (HEN) experiments (currently operating or planned for the near future) to explore their common scientific potential and to establish the basis for a joint data analysis strategy.

Many of the astrophysical sources and violent phenomena observed in our Universe are potential emitters of gravitational waves and high-energy cosmic radiation, in the form of photons, hadrons, and presumably also neutrinos. Both gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos are alternative cosmic messengers that may escape very dense media and travel unaffected over cosmological distances, carrying information from the innermost regions of the astrophysical engines (from which photons and charged cosmic rays can barely reach us). For the same reasons, such messengers could also reveal new, hidden sources that were not observed by conventional photon-based astronomy.

Coincident observation of GWs and HENs may thus play a critical role in multi-messenger astronomy. This is particularly true at the present time owing to the advent of a new generation of dedicated detectors: ANTARES, now fully operational in the Mediterranean Sea, and Ice Cube, taking data and proceeding with deployment at the South Pole, as well as the GW interferometers Virgo in Italy and LIGO in the United States, both upgrading and preparing for a common science run in mid-2009.

Given the complexity of the instruments, a successful joint analysis of this data set will be possible only if the expertise and knowledge of the data is shared between the two communities.

This perspective is the motivation for this three-day workshop bringing together physicists from the aforementioned collaborations and theorists developing the models of GW+HEN sources. The idea is to foster scientific exchange, and to develop joint strategies and analysis tools to best utilize the common data.

The workshop features reviews of the current theoretical knowledge about the mechanisms of GW and HEN emission and the potential common sources, as well as a status report of each of the detectors. A large amount of time is dedicated to discussions on the combined GW+HEN searches, their scientific pay-off (constraints of the source models, consequences for fundamental physics) and implementation issues (relevant common data sets, analysis pipelines, possibility/feasibility of online alerts).

The workshop included a session with contributed talks with contributions in the topics connected to the GW+HEN search problem including (but not limited to) the observation and modelling for sources of high-energy radiation such as Gamma-Ray Bursts, Soft Gamma-Ray Repeaters, microquasars or other jet sources.

We had a lively workshop of about 60 participants.

For more information, the organizers can be contacted by email at:

The Scientific Advisory Committee:
P. Brady (UWM and the LSC, USA), P. Binetruy (APC, France), F. Fidecaro (U. of Pisa and Virgo, Italy), C. Finley (UWM and Ice Cube, USA), T. Gaisser (U. of Delaware and Ice Cube, USA), N. Gehrels (NASA GSFC, USA), F. Halzen (UWM and Ice Cube, USA), P. Hello (LAL and Virgo, France), J. J. Hernandez (U. of Valencia and ANTARES, Spain), Sz. Márka (Columbia U. and the LSC, USA), P. Mészáros (Penn State U., USA), L. Moscoso (CEA and APC, France), T. Piran (Hebrew U. of Jerusalem, Israel), D. Reitze (U. of Florida and the LSC, USA), B. Schutz (Albert-Einstein-Institut and the LSC, Germany), E. Waxman (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel).

The Local Organizing Committee:
Bruny Baret, Matteo Barsuglia, Eric Chassande-Mottin, Antoine Kouchner, Szabolcs Márka, Thierry Pradier, Véronique Van Elewyck

Paris, FRANCE