Today's colloquium: Science with the first station of the Long Wavelength Array and beyond

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Construction of the first station of the Long Wavelength Array (LWA1)was completed in 2011. The LWA1 has since undergone commissioning and regular scientific observations from four calls for proposals with a second station funded and currently under construction at Sevilleta wildlife refuge near Socorro. The LWA1 is co-located with the Very Large Array and consists of 262 dual-polarization dipoles, with four independently-steerable dual-polarization beams available that can be tuned to any frequency between 5 and 88 MHz. I am going to present a brief overview of the station architecture and the larger vision for the Long Wavelength Array project. I will also discuss a selection of the first scientific results obtained with LWA1. This includes transient searches with the discovery of radio emission from fireballs, detection of pulsars, including millisecond pulsars, giant pulses, and RRATs, Solar and Jupiter bursts, ionospheric science, and imaging of lightning. In the context of LWA1 and beyond I will briefly discuss progress made towards the detection of the cosmological dark age with LWA1 and a newly-constructed station at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in California. This includes an overview for the path forward with the larger LWA project in the coming years toward a general purpose imaging instrument for arcsecond-scale structures below 100 MHz and a super station for transient searches and cosmology.