Experimental Efforts to Detect Gravitational Waves

Thin Film Helps Detect Gravitational Waves

I t’s only a slight exaggeration to say that a few layers of molecules helped make possible one of the most important physics observations of the past several decades. Those layers of metal oxideswhich barely add up to 2 μm in thicknesscoat the highly specialized mirrors that make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. The coatings make LIGO’s mirrors exceptional...

Exploiting large-scale correlations to detect continuous gravitational waves.

Fully coherent searches (over realistic ranges of parameter space and year-long observation times) for unknown sources of continuous gravitational waves are computationally prohibitive. Less expensive hierarchical searches divide the data into shorter segments which are analyzed coherently, then detection statistics from different segments are combined incoherently. The novel method presented h...

If light waves are stretched by gravitational waves, how can we use light as a ruler to detect gravitational waves?

Method to detect gravitational waves from an ensemble of known pulsars

Combining information from weak sources, such as known pulsars, for gravitational wave detection, is an attractive approach to improve detection efficiency. We propose an optimal statistic for a general ensemble of signals and apply it to an ensemble of known pulsars. Our method combines F -statistic values from individual pulsars using weights proportional to each pulsar’s expected optimal sig...

Gravitational Waves from Gravitational Collapse

Gravitational wave emission from stellar collapse has been studied for more than three decades. Current state-of-the-art numerical investigations of collapse include those that use progenitors with more realistic angular momentum profiles, properly treat microphysics issues, account for general relativity, and examine non-axisymmetric effects in three dimensions. Such simulations predict that g...