LIGO's "Science Reach"

Abstract

Technical discussions of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) sensitivity often focus on its effective sensitivity to gravitational waves in a given band; nevertheless, the goal of the LIGO Project is to ``do science.'' Exploiting this new observational perspective to explore the Universe is a long-term goal, toward which LIGO's initial instrumentation is but a first step. Nevertheless, the first generation LIGO instrumentation is sensitive enough that even non-detection --- in the form of an upper limit --- is also informative. In this brief article I describe in quantitative terms some of the science we can hope to do with first and future generation LIGO instrumentation: it short, the ``science reach'' of the detector we are building and the ones we hope to build.