Schutz was also one of the initiators of the proposal for the space-borne gravitational wave detector LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), and he coordinated the European planning for its data analysis until the mission was adopted by ESA in 2016.
A National Science Foundation Fellowship allowed him to spend the year 1971-72 in Cambridge, England, where he divided his time between the research group of Stephen Hawking and the Institute of Astronomy, led by Martin Rees.
He then moved to a postdoctoral position at Yale University, in the group of James Bardeen, where he started a fruitful collaboration with fellow postdoc John Friedman.
Together with Milde Science Communications, Schutz developed the Scienceface website,[17] which offers original interviews and short videos of scientists working on black holes and gravitational waves.
Again with help of Milde Science Communications and also Exozet Potsdam, Schutz developed a multimedia popular lecture on gravitational waves called Music of the Spheres, which he presented in many locations around the world, leading up to the first detection in 2015.
[21] In his PhD thesis in 1971, Schutz reformulated the relativistic equations of fluid dynamics in terms of scalar velocity potentials,[1] an approach that has since had many applications in field theory and cosmology.
[22][23] In what is now called the Chandrasekhar-Friedman-Schutz (CFS) instability, gravitational wave emission taps into the rotational energy of the star in such a way that a small initial perturbation will grow exponentially fast unless it is sufficiently strongly damped by some other effect, like viscosity.
The Futamase-Schutz method[25] is free of the point-mass singularities used in most other approaches to this problem, and it is based on initial data, so it is mathematically fully consistent and convergent.
They then used it to prove rigorously that the standard “quadrupole formula” for the emission of gravitational waves applies even if the sources are orbiting black holes, which are of course not small corrections to Newtonian objects.
Because of the importance of H0 and because of the difficulty of measuring it accurately with other astronomical methods, this became a principal part of the scientific case for building LIGO and other detectors, which were being proposed in the late 1980s.
As future observations by LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA accumulate more and more statistics, this method is expected in the long run to provide the most accurate way of measuring H0.
Schutz oriented most of the effort of his research group in Cardiff after 1986 to the development of methods of data analysis, not just to detect binary system mergers, but also to search for spinning neutron stars, for a random cosmological background of gravitational waves, and for unexpected signals.
Also in the late 1980s, Schutz began working with Chris Clarke and John Stewart to develop methods to program supercomputers to solve Einstein’s equations, with the aim of studying the mergers of binary black holes.
In the 1990s, Kostas Kokkotas and Schutz[30] discovered a new family of neutron-star vibration modes that do not exist in Newtonian gravity, in which the relativistic gravitational field around the star is the principal dynamical element.
Supplied with leading-edge in-house computing systems, this group was for many years the largest in the world devoted to numerical relativity, and made fundamental contributions that underlie much of the current software in this field.
He helped develop the F-Statistic,[31] which is the optimal frequentist statistical measure of the significance of a possible detection of a nearly periodic signal from a spinning neutron star.
Papa and other collaborators,[32] Schutz helped develop the Hough Transform technique for efficient hierarchical searches for such signals in months-long stretches of data, a method that is still a key tool for LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA analysis.