NANOGrav@UPRM: Growing and Characterizing the NANOGrav Gravitational-Wave Detector

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). This project partners the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez (UPRM) with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), an international scientific collaboration comprising several dozen institutions. The goals are (i) to increase the U.S. workforce diversity by promoting research and education of Hispanic/Latino undergraduate students in physics, and (ii) to advance several key NANOGrav science goals.

The activities are tailored to retain physics students, to train them in forefront physics research, and to motivate them to enter graduate school by way of a series of educational and closely supervised research projects. NANOGrav uses a galaxy-sized detector of pulsars that emit radio pulses with atomic-clock precision. The arrival times of those pulses are recorded with world-leading radio telescopes across the U.S. and Canada.

NANOGrav searches for correlated changes in the arrival times, induced by ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves, that are expected to be emitted by extremely massive black holes at the cores of merging galaxies. UPRM students will be trained in a variety of data quality and analysis methods, as well as simulation techniques and astrophysical interpretation by several NANOGrav senior scientists.

Besides nurturing the talent and fostering the participation of minorities, NANOGrav will directly benefit from the research by expanding and characterizing the array of pulsars. It is this so-called pulsar timing array that will detect gravitational waves and characterize their sources and hence contribute to our understanding of the history of the Universe and our place in it.

A holistic approach is implemented, where the students will be immersed in remote educational programs, present NANOGrav's research activities at local high schools, participate in workshops organized locally and on the U.S. mainland, take part in research projects, and spend several weeks at a NANOGrav institution contributing to daily ongoing research activities.

This award partners the Physics Department at the Mayagüez campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPRM) with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) Physics Frontiers Center to advance several key NANOGrav science goals and to increase the participation and retention of minorities in the field of physics. NANOGrav’s mission is to detect and characterize low-frequency gravitational waves from merging supermassive black hole binaries using a pulsar timing array as a galactic-scale detector.

Low-frequency gravitational-wave detection and characterization will provide information on galaxy merger rates, supermassive black hole masses, and processes leading to black hole coalescence. Characterization of individual pulsars of the array in turn yields information on, e.g., neutron star masses, equations of state, populations, and astrometric data; tests of general relativity; interstellar electron distributions; solar wind properties; and pulsar emission mechanisms.

Undergraduate students from UPRM will be involved in research projects of relevance to NANOGrav's mission, mentored at UPRM as well as remotely and onsite at several NANOGrav institutions. The research will involve searching for new pulsars, data quality checks, pulsar simulation development, and characterizing pulsar emission properties. The students will participate in workshops at UPRM, the Arecibo Observatory, and other NANOGrav sites, as well as to attend general NANOGrav and training meetings on the mainland.

The planned research activities are focused on growing and characterizing the pulsar timing array. The sensitivity of the array is proportional to the number of pulsars and hence finding new pulsars is of fundamental importance. It has also been observed that some pulsars change emission properties, which limits their timing resolution and usefulness in the array and therefore an investigation of pulsar emission and accompanying interstellar medium effects will provide a valuable contribution to NANOGrav science.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.