Incorporating Gravitational Wave Simulations into Undergraduate Education

With results from LIGO dominating the physics news, undergraduate students may request opportunities to do projects pertaining to gravitational waves. Experience at Bridgewater College has shown that completing an independent study in General Relativity prepares students to do a multi-week research project simulating gravitational waves in the weak-field limit. Based on the results of a summer collaboration with a student, a set of computational exercises guiding the simulation of gravitational waves from compact binary mergers was developed and submitted for publication in the PICUP collection. This exercise set, “Visualizing Effects of a Gravitational Wave with a Ring of Test Masses,” allows students with experience in upper-level mechanics to produce a computer simulation in vpython without prior experience in General Relativity.