![]() ![]() ![]() The main advantage of doing this is that it produces essentially no vibration. It is possible to cool certain carefully selected materials by shining them with a carefully selected laser beam. However, most systems that would be able to keep everything at that temperature create too much vibration to be able to be used for something measuring gravitational waves. In order to make these measurements, every possible source of noise is important and must be minimized to the greatest extent possible! The next phase of LIGO involves creating an interferometer that operates at a temperature of about 123 K (-150 Celsius or -238 Fahrenheit. If you want to read more about LIGO science or interferometers click here: or watch this great video by Veritaseum (featuring one of my mentors!). This type of device is called an interferometer, taking advantage of the fact that light itself is a wave to measure gravitational waves. In order to detect these small length changes, LIGO splits a laser beam and then sends each part of that beam down two 4 km arms and back before it recombines with itself at a detector. Gravitational waves are extremely weak! The strongest gravitational waves detectable from Earth change the space inside LIGO detectors by lengths on the order of 10^-19 meters, which is 10000 times smaller than the radius of a proton. The goal of LIGO is to observe physical phenomena which are called gravitational waves, which stretch space itself. The Light Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is the NSF’s largest project, with over 1000 scientists working in the LIGO scientific collaboration. ![]() That sentence has a lot of acronyms and fancy jargon, so I will go through it one by one and slowly. This summer, I am participating in Caltech LIGO SURF, studying optical refrigeration for use in the LIGO detectors. I am currently home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania having completed my first week of my summer science internship. On campus I play frisbee and the jazz saxophone as well as spend lots of time in the physics lounge in the science center. Hi everyone! I’m Sam Schulz and I am a rising junior physics major. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |