Program: GN-2016B-Q-2

This proposal contains proprietary information regarding LIGO/Virgo science that must not be released or discussed or disclosed in any fashion outside the members of the IfA TAC or Gemini staff. We have entered a new era of gravitational wave astronomy with the first detection of gravitational waves by Advanced LIGO/VIRGO (Abbott et al,, 2016a). The increase in sensitivity of this experiment by more than an order of magnitude has now opened up the prospect of routine discovery of gravitational wave sources. The aLIGO/Virgo detector favours transient sources (neutron star or black hole mergers, and massive asymmetric core-collapses), with sky localisation regions of 100s-1000 square degrees.Our team leads the world (Abbott et al., 2016b) in the followup search for optical counterparts to these events because (i) with Pan-STARRS we can survey 1000 square degrees to r = 21.5 in any one night, (ii) we have pre-existing 5 color image of the sky and the software pipeline to convolve and subtract a map of a LIGO region and find transients and build light curves in five bands with a pre-event template image in each band, (iii) after 5 years of the Pan-STARRS survey we have the sophisticated infrastructure in place to find the needle in the haystack of difference detections with machine-learning processing, (iv) Target of Opportunity time on 8 meter class telescope (Gemini) in addition to UH88 time, (v) an ongoing program of transient research to classify and characterize the various populations of explosive transients in the universe, including new superluminous supernovae. This proposal is for TOO observations with GMOS of Pan-STARRS candidates associated with LIGO alerts.