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Becca Ewing

Becca Ewing — Faculty
Office: 301 Whitmore Laboratory
Address: The Pennsylvania State University, Department of Physics, 104 Davey Lab Box 228, University Park, PA 16802
ree55@psu.edu
Becca Ewing
Physics LIGO Gravitational Waves Multimessenger Astrophysics CMA IGC

I am a fifth year graduate student and Mildred Dresselhaus Graduate Fellow at Penn State. I work in Chad Hanna's group, mainly focusing on gravitational wave detection of compact binary mergers. Our group works with the GstLAL pipleline, a matched filtering algorithm for real-time detection of gravitational wave signals. Recently, I have been working on characterizing the performance of low-latency gravitational wave detection pipelines by using simulated signals. Additionally, I am interested in the joint detection of gravitational waves and gamma ray bursts using the Swift telescope.

Publications
  1. Becca Ewing, Surabhi Sachdev, Ssohrab Borhanian, B. Sathyaprakash “Archival searches for stellar-mass binary black holes in LISA data.” Phys. Rev. D 103 2 (2021) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.103.023025
  2. R. Abbott, others “GWTC-3: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the Second Part of the Third Observing Run.” (2021)
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.