Speaker
Mansi Kasliwal
Description
We are all enjoying the dawn of a new era with multiple
direct detections of gravitational waves from merging black
holes and eagerly a waiting a merger with at least one
neutron star. Here, I will present my ongoing efforts and
my view on prospects to identify and characterize an
electromagnetic counterpart. Among the various models
for electromagnetic emission from binary neutron star
mergers, free neutron decay and disk wind emission give
the most luminous and fast-evolving optical counterpart. I
will describe co-ordinated global effort, the GROWTH
(Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients
Happen) network working in tandem with the Zwicky
Transient Facility to search for this optical effort. I will also
describe my phased efforts to build a wide-field infrared
camera to look for longer wavelength kilonova emission
hidden by high opacity.
