Profile: Jonathan Allen

Your personal background.
This is a new account for JonAllen@MIT.edu, which is no longer a valid email address, since I am no longer at MIT/LIGO. You may contact me at JonathanAllen1@Netscape.net. At Bose Corporation, I have permission to run Einstein@Home on my new scope, a WaveRunner 6100A, and so I opened a second account to do this (having lost my MIT account code in my MIT webmail inbox).
Your opinions about Einstein@Home
I am optimistic about LIGO, and its prospects for adding greatly to our understanding of the cosmos. Having served as a Science Operator at Hanford in 1/05, I have witnessed how sensitive our instrument can become when snow drifts over the observatory, the highway, the railroad tracks, and even temporarily grounding the air traffic. The silence was deafening as our measurement range skyrocketed to unprecidented heights. We now have a powerful hydraulic isolation system installed at Livingston, allowing for the best ever sensitivity in the presence of railway traffic and local logging. When this is implemented at Hanford, we should be able to attain nearly \\"blizzard-time\\" sensitivity all year. My hope is that by then, we\\'ll be operating a much higher percentage of the time, with the Italian observatory running concurrently. This will produce huge amounts of data to analyse, but the computational capacity of Einstein@Home may swell to handle it, resulting in the capture of telling astrophysical events which enlighten our understanding of the universe.
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant NSF-0200852 and by the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the investigators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or the MPG.

Copyright © 2009 Bruce Allen for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration