Gravitational wave propagation: a new way to explore the dark universe – GWPro

Despite the large amount of astronomical data collected in the last decades, the nature of dark matter and dark energy still remains a mystery. New clues to help unveiling this mystery can be obtained from the recently established gravitational wave (GW) astronomy, which bring new data to test our cosmological models in an independent and complementary way with respect to common electromagnetic observations.
In particular the propagation of GWs through the universe can be efficiently probed with current and future interferometers, thus assessing some of the fundamental properties of the dark sector. Several models of dark matter and dark energy can be put to the test, but only if their effects on the propagation of GWs are well understood theoretically and only if unambiguous phenomenological signatures are identified.
The scope of GWPro is to discover and characterise observable effects of the dark universe on the propagation of GWs, to test these effects with current and forthcoming GW and multi-messenger data, and to assess the potential of future GW observatories to constrain or detect them. GWPro constitutes a strongly multidisciplinary project which will help connecting theory and observation, and will provide the methods and results needed to explore the dark universe with the fast-expanding GW astronomy. The ultimate goal of GWPro is to deliver the most complete and up-to-date picture of the dark universe, based on the entirely available information from both GW and electromagnetic observations.
GWPro is also extremely timely: in the next few years the current network of GW interferometers will be upgraded and expanded to provide more and better observations, while the science case of LISA and future 3G detectors will be defined on similar timescales. As a junior scientist with extensive research experience in both cosmology and GWs, and given the data analysis tools I developed working as a member of both LIGO and LISA, I am the right person to lead GWPro.