IN THE PRESS


Graduate Student Pep Covas awarded a FPI-CAIB grant

15 November, 2018

     

Pep Covas Vidal has just been received one of the 12 FPI-CAIB grants for PhD students. This competitive grant, co-financed by the European Union, provides funding for four years and its aims is to turn graduate students into researchers.

Pep completed his degree in Physics at the UIB, where he had Alicia Sintes as advisor for his undergraduate thesis “Estudi dels estels de neutrons com a fonts d’ones gravitacionals”. Afterwards, he obtained a master’s degree in Advanced Physics and Applied Mathematics (the specialization in astrophysics and relativity) at the UIB. His master’s thesis is “Characterization of the Hough all-sky search for continuous gravitational wave signals using LIGO data”.

Pep has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since August 2015 and maintains its active participation, forming part of the Continuous Wave (CW) group, the Detector Characterization group and the team of translators of www.ligo.org. As a member of the ContinuousWave Group (CW), he is responsible for finding signals from isolated neutron stars using the Hough method. These contributions have been published in Phys. Rev. D  96 062002 and Phys. Rev. D 97 102003 as papers of LIGO. During his threemonth research stay at the gravitational wave detector located in Hanford (USA), he made ‘shifts’ in which he monitored the state of the detector and the quality of the data produced, moreover he characterized and mitigated several sources of noise that had hindered data analysis and the detection of gravitational waves. These results were published in Phys. Rev. D 97 082002  where he is the first author. He also carry out a stay as a researcher at the University of Sapienza (Italy) and in Albert Einstein Institute (Hannover).

Currently Pep is leading the search of gravitational waves from unknown neutron stars using data from the second observing run (O2) of Advanced LIGO. In addition, he participates in outreach activities and is the administrator of the twitter group’s account (@UIBGRG).

Congratulations Pep!