The Hunt for Gravitational Waves

Published in the Research School of Physics Event Horizon
Vol44 Issue13 1–5 April 2019

The Hunt for Gravitational Waves

Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), as part of an international team of scientists, are set to resume their hunt for gravitational waves - ripples in space and time - on April 1. 

One of the key features of this round of  search, which is also called O3, is employment of a technique called "squeezing” to reduce levels of quantum noise that can mask faint gravitational-wave signals. This technique was developed at ANU's Centre for Gravitational Physics, Department of Quantum Science, lead by Prof. David McClelland. As the result of the latest upgrades, the LIGO detectors are now about 40% more sensitive compared with the last two rounds of search, which means that they can survey an even larger volume of space for powerful, wave-making events, such as the collisions of black holes. Joining the search will be Virgo, the gravitational-wave detector located at the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) in Italy, which has almost doubled its sensitivity since its last run and is also starting up April 1.

So far LIGO and Virgo have seen ten binary black holes and one binary neutron star. In O3, the researchers are hoping to detect gravitational wave signals  from new types of events such as binaries containing both a neutron star and a black hole or continuous gravitational waves from rotating neutron stars.  

More information about the imminent search round: https://www.ozgrav.org/news/o3-the-hunt-for-gravitational-waves-resumes - https://www.ligo.org/news.php

Image: LIGO team members (left-to-right: Fabrice Matichard, Sheila Dwyer, Hugh Radkins) install in-vacuum equipment as part of the squeezed-light upgrade. Credit: Nutsinee Kijbunchoo/ANU