Gravitational Radiation Sources and Signatures

The goal of these lecture notes is to introduce the developing research area of gravitational-wave phenomenology. In more concrete terms, they are meant to provide an overview of gravitational-wave sources and an introduction to the interpretation of real gravitational wave detector data. They are, of course, limited in both regards. Either topic could be the subject of one or more books, and certainly more than the few lectures possible in a summer school. Nevertheless, it is possible to talk about the problems of data analysis and give something of their avor, and do the same for gravitational wave sources that might be observed in the upcoming generation of sensitive detectors. These notes are an attempt to do just that. Despite an 83 year history, our best theory explaining the workings of gravity | Einstein's theory of general relativity | is relatively untested compared to other physical theories. This owes principally to the fundamental weakness of the gravitational force: the precision measurements required to test the theory were not possible when Einstein rst described it, or for many years thereafter. The direct detection of gravitational-waves is a central component of our rst investigations into the dynamics of the weakest of the known fundamental forces: gravity. It is only in the last 35 years that general relativity has been put to signi cant test. Today, the rst e ects of static relativistic gravity beyond those described by Newton have been well-studied using precision measurements of the motion of the planets, their satellites and the principal asteroids. Dynamical