General Relativity & Quantum Cosmology

The long-awaited detection of gravitational waves has provided us with another source of information about the Universe. In this talk I will give an overview of how we extract information from gravitational wave signals with a focus on signals for which we do not have a definitive and reliable model for what the signal looks like. In particular I will describe how we can analyze the signal emitted after two neutron stars have merged. I will describe how the information extracted from such a signal can be used to place constrains on the equation of state of dense matter.

Calculating the path integral over all causal sets will take a lot of computing power, and requires a way to suppress non-manifold like causal sets. To work towards these goals we can start by taking the path integral over a restricted class of causal sets, the 2d orders. Using these have found a phase transition and been able to study the Hartle-Hawking wave function in causal sets. In this talk I will present these recent results (arXiv:1410.8775 and arXiv:1706.06432), and some preliminary data exploring how the behavior of the 2d orders is influenced by coupling them to an Ising model.