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Gravity Wave Detector Ready For Business

Posted by timothy on from the very-expensive-ripples dept.

Arthur Embleton writes "The BBC has an article about a Gravity Wave Detector. There are two L shaped set-ups. One in Washington, the other in Louisiana. They've got a Laser pointing at a mirror 4km away, watching for the reflection and if it is distorted then it shows that there has been a gravitational pulse, possibly by two Black Holes colliding. The detectors are apparently so accurate they can measure to one-thousandth of the width of a proton! How did they test that it works?"

1 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. More info by crapulent · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here are the slides [pdf] from the Oct 2002 NSF review. Lots of pictures, graphs, technical details, etc. for anyone interested. In a nutshell they are aiming to measure strain on the order of 10^-21 over the frequency range of 100Hz - 1kHz. Using two facilities separated by 3000km allows them to search for correlated events and weed out localized noise. IANAP.

    More slides here.

    LIGO home page.

    HTH.