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Rainer "Rai" Weiss is a German-born American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT and an adjunct professor at LSU. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.
The Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics is a Max Planck Institute whose research is aimed at investigating Einstein's theory of relativity and beyond: Mathematics, quantum gravity, astrophysical relativity, and gravitational-wave astronomy. The institute was founded in 1995 and is located in the Potsdam Science Park in Golm, Potsdam and in Hannover where it closely collaborates with the Leibniz University Hannover. Both the Potsdam and the Hannover parts of the institute are organized in three research departments and host a number of independent research groups.
GEO600 is a gravitational wave detector located near Sarstedt, a town 20 kilometres (12 mi) to the south of Hanover, Germany. It is designed and operated by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Leibniz Universität Hannover, along with University of Glasgow, University of Birmingham and Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, and is funded by the Max Planck Society and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
The Virgo interferometer is a large Michelson interferometer designed to detect the gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. It is in Santo Stefano a Macerata, near the city of Pisa, Italy. The instrument has two arms that are three kilometres long and contain its mirrors and instrumentation inside an ultra-high vacuum.
Gravitational waves are transient displacements in a gravitational field – generated by the motion or acceleration of gravitating masses – that radiate outward from their source at the speed of light. They were first proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and then later by Henri Poincaré in 1905 as the gravitational equivalent of electromagnetic waves. In 1916, Albert Einstein demonstrated that gravitational waves result from his general theory of relativity as ripples in spacetime.
A gravitational-wave detector is any device designed to measure tiny distortions of spacetime called gravitational waves. Since the 1960s, various kinds of gravitational-wave detectors have been built and constantly improved. The present-day generation of laser interferometers has reached the necessary sensitivity to detect gravitational waves from astronomical sources, thus forming the primary tool of gravitational-wave astronomy.
Gravitational-wave astronomy is a subfield of astronomy concerned with the detection and study of gravitational waves emitted by astrophysical sources.
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Carlton Morris Caves is an American theoretical physicist. He is currently professor emeritus and research professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Mexico. Caves works in the areas of physics of information; information, entropy, and complexity; quantum information theory; quantum chaos, quantum optics; the theory of non-classical light; the theory of quantum noise; and the quantum theory of measurement. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Alessandra Buonanno is an Italian-American theoretical physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam. She is the head of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" department. She holds a research professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park, and honorary professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. She is a leading member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which observed gravitational waves from a binary black-hole merger in 2015.
A torsion-bar antenna is a novel scheme for a gravitational wave detector, proposed by M. Ando, et al. in 2010. The proposed design is composed of two, long, thin bars, suspended as torsion pendula in a cross-like fashion. Their differential angle would be compared using a set of optical cavities with one end mirror of each cavity fixed to the ends of each bar. Such a detector could be fashioned either for ground-based or space-based use.
Heinz Billing was a German physicist and computer scientist, widely considered a pioneer in the construction of computer systems and computer data storage, who built a prototype laser interferometric gravitational wave detector.
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David Ernest McClelland is an Australian physicist, with his research focused on the development of the manipulation and control of optical quantum states, and its implementation into gravitational wave observatories. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America. Since 2001, he has been a professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in the Research School of Physics and Engineering, in Canberra (Australia). He is Director of the ANU's Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics and Deputy Director of OzGrav - the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery.
PyCBC is an open source software package primarily written in the Python programming language which is designed for use in gravitational-wave astronomy and gravitational-wave data analysis. PyCBC contains modules for signal processing, FFT, matched filtering, gravitational waveform generation, among other tasks common in gravitational-wave data analysis.
Michel Davier is a French physicist.
Peter Reed Saulson is an American physicist and professor at Syracuse University. He is best known as a former spokesperson for the LIGO collaboration serving from 2003 to 2007 and research on gravitational wave detectors.
Rana X. Adhikari is an American experimental physicist. He is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an associate faculty member of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ICTS-TIFR).
Lisa Barsotti is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kavli Institute.
References
- ↑ Henderson, Mark (20 August 2009). "'Non-discovery' of space-time ripples opens door to birth of the Universe". The Times. Retrieved 15 November 2009.[ dead link ]
- ↑ Svitil, Kathy (24 August 2011). "New LIGO Executive Director Named". California Institute of Technology. Archived from the original on 6 December 2017. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
- ↑ Vieru, Tudor (24 August 2011). "LIGO Experiment Gets New Executive Director". Softpedia.
- ↑ "LIGO-India". IndiGO .
- ↑ Twilley, Nicola. "Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X . Retrieved 11 February 2016.
- ↑ Abbott, B.P.; et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration) (11 February 2016). "Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger". Phys. Rev. Lett. 116 (6): 061102. arXiv: 1602.03837 . Bibcode:2016PhRvL.116f1102A. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102. PMID 26918975. S2CID 119286014.
- ↑ Naeye, Robert (11 February 2016). "Gravitational Wave Detection Heralds New Era of Science". Sky and Telescope. Retrieved 11 February 2016.
- ↑ Castelvecchi, Davide; Witze, Alexandra (11 February 2016). "Einstein's gravitational waves found at last". Nature News. doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19361. S2CID 182916902 . Retrieved 11 February 2016.
- ↑ "NAS online awards".
- ↑ Reitze, David; Saulson, Peter; Grote, Hartmut (2019). Advanced Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Detectors. World Scientific. doi:10.1142/10181. ISBN 978-981-3146-07-5.
