LIGO LASER INTERFEROMETER GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE OBSERVATORY

Rinto Jacob, Job Joseph, Sebin Joseph, Second Year BSc Physics,
Department of Physics, ST. BERCHMANS COLLEGE, Changanassery,Kottayam,Kerala,India-686101

A Giant Interferometer
• LIGO is the world's largest gravitational wave observatory
• Comprises of two enormous laser interferometers located thousands of
kilometers apart
• LIGO's observatories are technically known as interferometers
• Interferometers merge two or more sources of light to create an interference
pattern. Such patterns result from overlapping waves of light.
• Interference patterns provide clues about the properties of the sources that
emitted the light
• In LIGO, the lasers beamed down its arms bounce back and are set to cancel
each other out completely, resulting in no light at the photodetector
• If there is any difference between the lengths of the two arms, some light will
travel to where it can be recorded by a photo detector
• If a gravitational wave were to pass through the LIGO facility, it would stretch
one detector arm and compress the other, throwing off this perfect destructive
interference. Some light would then reach the photodetector
• The space-time ripples cause the distance traveled by a light beam to change
as the gravitational wave passes by, and the amount of light falling on the
photodetector to vary and it produces a signal defining how the light falling
on it changes over time

Gravitational waves

Moving masses like stars or black holes produce gravitational waves

in the fabric of space-time. When two dense objects such as neutron stars or
black holes orbit each other, space-time is stirred by their motion
and gravitational energy ripples throughout the universe a strong gravitational
wave will produce displacements on the order of 10 -18meters - this is 1000
times smaller than the diameter of a proton.  Waves of this strength will be
produced by very massive systems undergoing large accelerations, like two
orbiting black holes that are about to merge into one. 
LIGO will be able to The gravitational Department of PHYSICS
detect a change in waves detected by
distance between its LIGO were nearly
Reference: https://space.mit.edu/LIGO/index.html, https://www.ligo.org/science/GW-GW2.php mirrors 1/10,000th the 1.3 BILLION light
Albert Einstein; Relativity:TheSpecial and the General Theory (General Press) width of a proton! years away!