LIGO’s next steps

Now that we’ve detected gravitational waves, what’s next for the field?

Tau.Neutrino said:

LIGO’s next steps

Now that we’ve detected gravitational waves, what’s next for the field?

> The detectors at LIGO lit up when the waves passed through the 4 kilometre arms and shrunk them by 10 ^-18 meters.

I’ve always found that to be totally amazing.

> NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a weak gamma-ray burst starting just after the same event in the same region of the sky. The team contacted LIGO with their findings. Once the two camps were in agreement about their discovery, they teamed up to search for more data from this monumental event.

Nice.

> Larger arms and more sensitive detection technology means being able to widen their frequency range, which will allow them to tap into more signals.

Hold on. More sensitive detection technology. How do they plan to do that?

The LIGO “observatory” is made up of two identical and widely separated interferometers situated in sparsely populated, out-of-the-way places: LIGO Hanford in southeastern Washington State in an arid shrub-steppe region crisscrossed by hundreds of layers of ancient lava flows; and LIGO Livingston, 3002 km away in a vast, humid, loblolly pine forest east of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Hold on!

If that OP article is accurate, then what happened to LIGO India? LIGO India is a proposal to build another exact copy of the current LIGO in India. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligo-india

PS. If they let it, LIGO could be the world’s mort accurate seismometer.

More on LIGO at links from https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/look-deeper

The following is their IR laser table.

LIGO optics in suspension.

How do they plan on improving that?

> How do they plan on improving that?

I don’t see anything much in Google Scholar about that, other than improving mirror performance and coatings using silicon nitride and other materials.