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Physicist Awarded NSF Grant to Continue Gravitational Wave Detector Research

Renée Gearhart Levy — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 20:11:29 +0000

In March 2023, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is set to begin its fourth yearlong observational period. Scientists on site in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, have spent the last two years on hardware and software upgrades to increase the sensitivity of the detectors, making them capable of sensing “fainter” gravitational waves to detect more events than ever before.

Stefan Ballmer

At the same time, members of the Advanced LIGO team are continuously working on refinements for future observation periods years ahead. , professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was a member of the team that helped design and build the LIGO detectors.

To continue that work, Ballmer was recently awarded a $555,000 to develop technology for sensing optical cavity mismatches and actuators for suspensions for the next generation detector, a renewal of funding for detector technology for gravitational-wave astrophysics.

The award also provides support for Ballmer’s doctoral students, including Elenna Capote, who is currently on site in Hanford, helping tune the detector alignment and control systems to make sure the detector performs as designed.

“These detectors are complicated machines with thousands of control loops keeping four main mirrors and an additional 30 suspended mirrors aligned and controlled in length to keep the light resonant,” Ballmer says. “Every time you make a change, it really becomes a new detector that has to be re-tuned.”

How LIGO Works

LIGO uses a pair of giant laser detectors called interferometers, located 1,900 miles apart in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Each detector contains two 2.5-mile-long vacuum arms—tubes that run perpendicular to one another. A powerful laser beam is split into two and sent down the arms. Mirrors at the end reflect the light back to where the laser beam was split. Since the arms are the same length, the light should take exactly the same time to travel to the mirror at the end of each tunnel and back. But if a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it changes the distance between the mirrors, causing the light beams to return at different times.

By comparing both beams, LIGO is able to measure the stretching of spacetime caused by gravitational waves, a seminal observation first made in 2015 with the first physical confirmation of a gravitational wave generated by two colliding black holes, nearly 1.3 billion light years away.

According to Ballmer, the higher the laser power in the 2.5-mile-long arms, the more accurately scientists can determine the motion of the arm. But the amount of laser power that can be used is currently limited by imperfections in the detectors’ optical system. “The optical phase front of the laser coming back from the detector can get distorted by thermal effects in the mirrors,” he says.

Innovating LIGO

Physics graduate students Elenna Capote (front) and Varun Srivastava (back) working on site at LIGO Hanford in Washington state.

Ballmer is working on a diagnostic camera that records thermal distortions in the detector, allowing scientists to determine their cause and effect. While a prototype camera was developed under a previous award, “this continued support is for deploying that camera and miniaturizing it, making it easier to use on the site,” he says.

The award also supports collaborative research with scientists at MIT to redesign the test mass suspensions for the current detectors to use heavier masses. “Random arrival photons push the test masses around, so the heavier the test masses are, the less they move when they get randomly hit by a photon,” Ballmer explains. “Going to heavier test masses is a way to increase low frequency sensitivity.”

Previous research has focused on new coatings for the mirrors. Under the current grant, Ballmer is also exploring research and development to integrate these coatings on the detector. “The new coatings have much lower thermal noise, but do not work with some auxiliary laser frequencies in the detector. Changing the mirror coatings thus requires other changes in the detector, and so the R&D that’s going under this award is to prototype the new detector systems compatible with the new types of coatings,” he says.

In addition to being used to upgrade the LIGO detectors in its fifth or sixth observation cycle, Ballmer says these developments can be used as a baseline for the next generation of detectors.

Ballmer was a principal investigator on the Cosmic Horizon Explorer Study, a project planning for the third generation of detectors, which will have 10 times the sensitivity of Advanced LIGO. The Cosmic Explorer will push the detection range of black hole and neutron star mergers out into cosmic distances. “We will actually see mergers happening from the very first stars that formed in the universe,” he says.

The 100-page study will inform next steps in NSF funding decisions on the project, which Ballmer says will likely focus on the site proposal and development of the conceptual design for the detector. “We’ve all just seen these beautiful images from the James Webb telescope showing the furthest and earliest galaxies of lights. So, with the Cosmic Explorer, if there are black hole mergers in those early galaxies, we would see them,” he says.

About Stefan W. Ballmer

Ballmer joined Syracuse University in 2010. Leading up to his contributions to LIGO’s Nobel Prize-winning work, he received an NSF CAREER Award in 2013 to support detector technology in the era of gravitational wave astrophysics, providing $860,000 of research funding over five years.

In October 2021, Ballmer was named a (APS), for his critical role in the design and commissioning of the Advanced LIGO detectors and the scientific interpretation of their observations, leadership in the development of third-generation gravitational-wave detectors and mentoring of the next generation of gravitational-wave experimenters.

A native of Switzerland, Ballmer has held a visiting associate professor position at the University of Tokyo; a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; and a Robert A. Millikan Fellowship at Caltech. He earned a Ph.D. from MIT and a master’s degree from ETH Zurich in Switzerland. An aviation enthusiast, Ballmer enjoys flying in his spare time, is an instrument flight instructor and holds a commercial pilot license.

Physicist Stefan Ballmer Named APS Fellow

Dan Bernardi — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 12:57:23 +0000

Stefan Ballmer

Stefan W. Ballmer, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). He joins�� to receive the distinction during the 100 years the award has existed. The fellowship recognizes members who have made advances in physics through original research and publication, or who have made significant contributions in the application of physics to science and technology.

The APS honors each of their fellows with a dedicated citation for their work. Ballmer’s citation reads, “For a critical role in the design and commissioning of the Advanced LIGO detectors and the scientific interpretation of their observations, for leadership in the development of third-generation gravitational-wave detectors, and mentoring of the next generation of gravitational-wave experimenters.”

Ballmer has been a professor at the University since 2010 and his research interests span experimental gravitational-wave physics and gravitational-wave detector technology. In 2015, Ballmer led a team of University physicists, along with APS Fellows Duncan Brown, Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics, and Peter Saulson, professor emeritus of physics, who were instrumental in making the . This crowning achievement in gravitational-wave astronomy opened a new window onto the cosmos and confirmed a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity. Those detections of the after effects of a collision of two black holes were made by the�� (Advanced LIGO), which Ballmer helped to design and build.

Since then, through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ballmer and his students have been working to improve the detection capabilities of Advanced LIGO. The team has been researching and designing and new laser wavefront control sensors and actuators. Ballmer was also a principal investigator on the NSF’s Horizon Study for , a U.S. next-generation gravitational-wave detector concept capable of observing colliding black holes, and merging neutron stars across the entire universe and cosmic time. Graduate students of Ballmer’s research group are also on site at the observatories right now, preparing the detectors for the next observation run.

Along with Ballmer, other recent APS fellows from Syracuse University include Lisa Manning, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics and founding director of the , and Christian Santangelo, professor of physics, who each earned the honor in 2019. Jennifer Ross, professor and current department chair of physics, was named an APS Fellow in 2018.

Physics Department Works to Improve Gravitational Wave Detection

Dan Bernardi — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 17:16:48 +0000

Artist rendering of the collision of two neutron stars. Researchers at SU are working to improve Advanced LIGO’s ability to record gravitational waves from such events. (Credit: NSF/LIGO/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet)

Albert Einstein first predicted the presence of gravitational waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. Fast forward 99 years to 2015, when researchers obtained the first physical confirmation of a gravitational wave generated by two colliding black holes, nearly 1.3 billion light years away. This discovery, possibly one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements, was made possible by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) (Advanced LIGO).

The Advanced LIGO uses mirrors to help detect gravitational waves caused by the merging of black holes and neutron stars, but the faint signal can be masked by temperature fluctuations on the mirrors’ surface. Finding better reflective coatings for the mirrors could prevent these fluctuations, improving LIGO’s ability to measure gravitational waves.

This is where physics faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) come in. Thanks to a grant from the NSF, the physics department will play a key role in developing better gravitational wave detectors. The award specifically funds the purchase and construction of a “cryogenic elastic loss measurement apparatus,” which will test how mirrors with different coatings react to a wide range of temperatures. Leading the project are A&S physics Professor , along with Steve Penn, co-principal investigator and associate professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Ballmer and his students will test coated glass sample disks from room temperature to 10 degrees above absolute zero using a device called a cryostat. The cryostat was purchased from the Syracuse-based company , whose founder, William E. Gifford, was a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Syracuse University from 1961 to 1978. The results will help show which glass coatings can improve LIGO’s wave detection. This research is part of LIGO’s Centers for Coatings Research (CCR), a collaboration funded specifically to find better coatings for gravitational-wave interferometers.

Ballmer says, “This apparatus will allow Syracuse University to play a much bigger role in finding and validating the coatings needed to upgrade Advanced LIGO and other future gravitational-wave detectors.”

Detecting and analyzing the information carried by gravitational waves has allowed researchers to observe the universe in a way never before possible, providing astronomers and other scientists with their first glimpses of previously unseen phenomena like colliding black holes, merging neutron stars and exploding stars. Through research being done by faculty and students in the Department of Physics, that view into the unseen will become even clearer.

LIGO Livingston Detector Catches Binary Neutron Star Merger, Says Physics Professor

Daryl Lovell — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 17:19:32 +0000

Today, the and VIRGO detector captured another binary neutron star merger

is an associate professor of physics at Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences. Below, he answers four key questions about the LIGO/VIRGO detection, and what it means for the greater world of physics.

Q: What is most significant about these findings?

Ballmer: “What we are really looking forward to is to get a stronger signal from the collision phase of the two neutron stars. That will tell us how nuclear matter behaves under these extreme conditions.

“This event was a little too far away for that. But it gives us a much better handle on the rate of such collisions. The upshot: if we just observe a little longer we will get the strong signal we are hoping for.”

—————-

Q: Can you break down what a binary neutron star merger is?

Ballmer: “A neutron star is an atomic nucleus the size of a city, but with the mass of a sun. We are observing the collision of two of these monsters at about half the speed of light.

“Since neutron stars still are made of matter (unlike black holes), we do expect to be able to see them optically as well, as was the case with GW170817, the first binary neutron star merger observed by LIGO.”

——————
Q: For someone not familiar with the physics world, why is this exciting?

Ballmer: “On a weekly basis we are now observing some of the most violent events in the universe, literally storms in space and time, shredding the remnants of stars. Black holes and neutron stars are no longer exotic hypothetical objects they once were, but the bread and butter of everyday science.

“This is also why the LIGO and Virgo collaborations now put out alerts as quickly as possible, in the hope that other astronomers can make complementary observations.

“In fact, you can download an app that alerts you within minutes whenever we see something interesting.” Link: ��

—————–

Q: How does this tie in or connect with (if at all) with the first black hole image that was released just a short while ago?

Ballmer: “Since the latest run (O3) started we have observed 3 black hole mergers, and this neutron star merger. That brings the total observed in all runs to 13 black hole mergers and 2 neutron star mergers.

“It is amazing that what was considered to be impossible just three and a half years ago – and was worth the 2017 Nobel prize – is now happening weekly.”

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Physicist Gabriela González G’95 Reveals How Syracuse Prepared Her to Make Science History

Rob Enslin — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 23:00:19 +0000

Gabriela González G’95 delivering a TED Talk.

��ǰ��, life is a honeymoon—to quote a recent country hit.��No sooner had the renowned physicist returned from her own honeymoon than she and her husband, fellow Argentinian theorist Jorge Pullin, moved the party to Syracuse in 1989. Swapping modest digs in Central Argentina for similar ones in Central New York, the newlyweds found themselves at the future epicenter of gravitational-wave astronomy.

At Syracuse, Pullin worked as a postdoc, while González chipped away at a Ph.D., mastering the finer points of spacetime measurement—a mathematical model supporting Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which posits that Earth’s rotation warps space and time.

Spacetime also underpins González’s prize-winning research into gravitational waves, which are invisible “ripples” caused by the collisions of dense, massive objects, such as black holes.

From 2011-17, González was spokesperson of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration, an international community of researchers that hunts for gravitational waves. González’s involvement with LIGO led to her induction into both the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as her inclusion on Nature magazine’s 2016 list of 10 people who matter in science.

González beaming at the 2016 announcement of LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves.

“Jorge and I like to think we have proven Einstein wrong, since he said his theory was not to blame for people falling in love,” jokes González, who, along with Pullin, is on the physics faculty at Louisiana State University. “When I was at Syracuse, I never thought that learning how to measure spacetime would make scientific history. It’s rewarding to do what you love.”

The College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) recently caught up with��González, who admits that her honeymoon is far from over.

González flanked by David Howard Reitze (left) and Peter Saulson, physics professors at Florida and Syracuse, respectively. All three are former LIGO spokespeople. (Photo courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences)

What have we learned about gravitational waves since their detection three years ago?
They are not as rare as expected. Nature is very generous, and large black holes [whose primordial collisions give off gravitational waves] seem to find each other a lot. Our study of gravitational-wave astronomy has begun with a bang.

A Big Bang, literally [as gravitational waves offer clues about the early universe]. What’s next for gravitational-wave research?
A year ago, I would have said it was detecting a collision of neutron stars with electromagnetic counterparts. We saw that, however, in August of 2017, much earlier than expected.

The next big thing could be the discovery of a periodic signal from a rotating star in our galaxy, or, if I had to dream, a signal of unknown origin.

You are close to Peter Saulson [the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics in A&S], who, like you, was a spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. What have you learned from him?
Peter joined the Syracuse faculty in 1991, not long after I started my doctoral research there. In fact, I was his first Ph.D. student at Syracuse. He showed me that spacetime is not just mathematical abstraction; it is something real and measurable.

Peter is part of a strong group of researchers who are enthusiastic about these measurements. His passion is inspiring. At Syracuse, he was a caring advisor who patiently taught me a lot about conducting experiments.

You recently were elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. What does that say about your work?��
At first, I didn’t feel like I belonged to this esteemed group of people, which advises the federal government on scientific matters. After I joined, I began to appreciate the broad spectrum of their activities, particularly in areas of science literacy and diversity.

Did you know Stephen Hawking?
I spoke at a public symposium for his 75th birthday at the University of Cambridge [in July 2017, less than a year before his death.] Dr. Hawking not only delivered a moving public talk, but also said he liked mine.

Afterward, he gave me a copy of his autobiography, with his thumbprint on one of the pages. The page was from a chapter in which he discussed trying to make, albeit unsuccessfully, a gravitational-wave detector in the Seventies. We had a good laugh over it.

How do you feel about being a role model for young women and Latinas?
I want to show them that not all physicists are geniuses—or are male, gray haired, or eccentric. Most of them are fairly normal people.

We need to make sure young boys and girls don’t buy into the “mad scientist” stereotype. Instead, they need to understand that contributions to science—or any field, for that matter—require curiosity and hard work. This approach has served me well.

Neutron Collision Discovery a “Textbook Changer” says PBS NewsHour

Sawyer Kamman — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 18:13:32 +0000

Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics at the College of Arts and Sciences,��recently spoke with PBS NewsHour about the�� discoveries that came from the detection of two neutron stars colliding. The event gave researchers new information regarding the origins of heavy metals, including gold and platinum.��

“This really is a new type of astronomy, we’re bringing together all the tools a human has to bear on observing the universe,” he said. “Bringing all these tools together is going to allow us to learn so much more about the universe.”

See What is ‘The Most Spectacular Fireworks in the Universe’

Sawyer Kamman — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:59:15 +0000

When two neutron stars collided, scientists called “the most spectacular fireworks in the universe.” This crash also answered many previously unknown questions, especially the birth of heavy metals such as gold and platinum.�� Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman professor of physics, talked to the Associated Press about this discovery.

“This is getting everything you wish for,” he said. “This is our fantasy observation. We see the gold being formed,” Brown said.

Professor Duncan Brown on Clash of Neutron Stars

Ellen Mbuqe — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:45:18 +0000

Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman professor of physics,��talks to The Wall Street Journal about the creation of heavy metals such as gold and platinum forged in the collision between two neutron stars which .

“Gold is forged in the nuclear furnace of neutron star collisions,” said Brown, an astrophysicist, who studies gravitational waves at Syracuse University and who was involved in the effort. “In the strictest sense of turning matter into gold, this is where alchemy happens.”

Cosmic Collision Leads to New Breakthroughs

Sawyer Kamman — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:38:17 +0000

Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics ��talks to NPR about the groundbreaking discovery of the collision of two neutron stars, revealing that these strange smash-ups are the source of heavy elements such as gold and platinum.

“It’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful it makes me want to cry. It’s the fulfillment of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people’s efforts, but it’s also the fulfillment of an idea suddenly becoming real,” says Saulson, who has spent more than three decades working on the detection of gravitational waves.

How Syracuse University Physics Professor Duncan Brown Helped Discover a Cosmic Collision

Sawyer Kamman — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:36:06 +0000

Go in-depth on the day when Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman professor of physics, helped discover the collision of two neutron stars and the birth of gold, platinum and other heavy metals.

LIGO Strikes Gold in New Discovery

Sawyer Kamman — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:32:03 +0000

Because of a collision of two neutron stars, scientists can now trace back the origins of precious metals like gold and platinum. ��ǰ��Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman professor of physics,��these findings are the result of years of hard work and research, and it really is just the start. He spoke with the LA Times about these findings.

“This is the beginning,” he said. “This is the beginning of bringing the entire human toolkit of observations, of gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves, to bear on understanding our universe and where we live.”

‘Space Alchemy’ Reveals Origin of Gold, Platinum

Sawyer Kamman — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:29:57 +0000

The Universe is an overall mystery to many, but a new discovery is helping lead scientists to discover the origins of gold and platinum. In Forbes,��Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman professor of physics,, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics explained how a neutron star collision helped reveal this scientific matchup.

“When you watch that radioactive decay, what you’re basically watching is space alchemy,” he said. “It’s the universe creating gold and platinum.”

LIGO Discovery Sheds Light on Origin of Gold

Sawyer Kamman — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 17:51:09 +0000

Scientists part of the LIGO group detected a massive collision of two neutron stars millions of light years ago, they were now able to understand where heavy metals such as gold and platinum originated.�� For Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics , this was a long time coming.

“The signals that were picked up were of a kind that we’d been hoping to find since the very early days of the project,” he said. “When we see it, we will know that we’ve seen it.”

Professor Duncan Brown on Major Discovery of Origins of Gold

Sawyer Kamman — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 16:47:05 +0000

After�� a team of scientists detected a collision of two neutron stars, they now know the origins of heavy metals like gold a�� platinum. Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman professor of physics, talks to Newsday about this disovery.

“This is getting everything you wish for,” he said. “This is our fantasy observation. We see the gold being formed.”

Professor Duncan Brown on Finding a Collision of Two Neutron Stars

Sawyer Kamman — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 16:24:19 +0000

After a discovering a collision of neutron stars, scientists can now explain how heavy elements like gold and platinum are created. In Business Insider,��Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman professor of physics��explained how this new discovery helped fuel new thinking.

“Some of the heavy elements are made in supernova explosions, but it turns out this can’t explain the abundances,” he said. “They didn’t appear to be coming from supernova explosions, and so people have wondered for a long time where they came from.” Now, they know.

Professors Contribute to Nobel Prize Winning Project

Sawyer Kamman — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 19:54:56 +0000

Several Physics Professors at Syracuse were heavily involved in research that contributed to Nobel-Prize winning work. The professors were involved with analyzing data points from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, using this to find out more on gravitational ripples stemming from the collision of black holes.

“The information encoded in those gravitational waves tells us about the universe, how stars evolve, how they live, how they die,” said professor Duncan Brown. “It’s not everyday that you get to be part of a whole new field of astronomy.”

��鶹��Ʒ Posts on Gravitational Waves Discovery

News Staff — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 13:59:16 +0000

Inside the LIGO Hanford Observatory (Credit: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory)

Gravitational Waves Detected 100 Years after Einstein’s Prediction

Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2016

For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos. … (read more)

Syracuse Scientists Integral to Discovery of Gravitational Waves (Video)

Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2016

Video: Searching For Gravitational Waves News Conference at Syracuse University

Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016

(view)

Gravitational Waves Discovery, New Carnegie Classification Underscore Research Excellence at Syracuse

Friday, Feb. 12, 2016

From all over campus to all around the world, a momentous discovery in the world of physics—in our universe—was made known Thursday, confirming what Albert Einstein brilliantly hypothesized 100 years ago. The announcement: Gravitational waves exist. … (read more)

Panel Discussion in NYC on Gravitational Waves Discovery (Video)

Thursday, February 2, 2017

On Thursday, Feb. 2, faculty members from Syracuse University and MIT joined together in New York City for a panel discussion on the historic discovery of gravitational waves. Syracuse University professors Duncan Brown and Peter Saulson and associate professor Stefan Ballmer, along with MIT professor Rainer Weiss (co-founder of LIGO) took part in a question-and-answer session moderated by Bob Dotson G’69. … (view)

Syracuse Alumnus Instrumental in LIGO’s Third Detection of Gravitational Waves

Thursday, June 1, 2017

An alumnus of the has been instrumental in the (LIGO)’s third detection of gravitational waves, demonstrating that a new window onto astronomy is fully open. … (read more)

Professor Duncan Brown Explains the Newest Gravitational Waves Discovery

Monday, June 5, 2017

, the Charles Brightman professor of physics, was also interviewed for Quanta magazine for the article . … (read more)

Physics Professors Interviewed about the Search for Gravitational Waves

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

, the Charles Brightman professor of physics, and , the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics, were both quoted by WSYR for the news report . … (read more)

Gravitational Waves Researchers Explain their Latest Discovery

Thursday, June 8, 2017

, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics, and , who earned a Ph.D. in physics, were both interviewed by the Detroit Free Press for the article . … (read more)

Professor Duncan Brown Quoted In Quanta Magazine

Sawyer Kamman — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 17:39:46 +0000

As many eyes were trained on the solar eclipse, another astronomical event took place, as Quanta Magazine detailed with comments from Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences Physics Professor, and LIGO Scientific Collaboration member, Duncan Brown.

“If you get all these different pieces then you can put together the full story,” said Brown, talking of the combination of “r-process” elements, which include uranium, platinum and gold, that together may be able to help physicists with understanding the behavior of matter at nucleic densities.

Gravitational Waves Researchers Explain their Latest Discovery

Ellen Mbuqe — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 19:26:47 +0000

Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics, and Alex Nitz G’15, who earned a Ph.D. in physics, were both interviewed by the Detroit Free Press for the article Former U.P. resident helps detect colliding black holes in...

Physics Professors Interviewed about the Search for Gravitational Waves

Ellen Mbuqe — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 19:26:55 +0000

Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman professor of physics, and Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics, were both quoted by WSYR for the news report SU Grad Key in Major Astronomy Breakthrough.

Professor Duncan Brown Explains the Newest Gravitational Waves Discovery

Ellen Mbuqe — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 19:29:17 +0000

Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman professor of physics, was also interviewed for Quanta magazine for the article The Latest Black Hole Collision Comes with a Twist.

Syracuse Alumnus Instrumental in LIGO’s Third Detection of Gravitational Waves

Rob Enslin — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 18:12:26 +0000

A rendering of two spiraling black holes.��Illustration by LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)

An alumnus of the has been instrumental in the (LIGO)’s third detection of gravitational waves, demonstrating that a new window onto astronomy is fully open.

, who earned a Ph.D. in physics, helped detect the signal on Jan. 4, 2017, using a software package he began developing at Syracuse. As was the case with LIGO’s first two detections, the wave in question came from the merger of two black holes, resulting in the formation of a single larger black hole.

Nitz is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover, Germany. From 2010-15, he was a member of Syracuse’s , part of the worldwide LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

LIGO is a national facility for gravitational-wave research, consisting of two massive detectors—one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana—that use laser interferometry to measure tiny ripples in spacetime, caused by gravitational waves from colliding black holes.

Alex Nitz (Courtesy of Detroit Free Press)

“We are extremely proud of Alex for helping detect the furthest binary black hole merger that LIGO has seen. These black holes are over 2.8 billion light-years away,” says Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman Professor of Physics at Syracuse, adding that a light-year equals 6 trillion miles.

Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics at Syracuse, says the detection of gravitational waves confirms Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “In this event, a black hole 31 times the mass of the sun collided, at half the speed of light, with a black hole 19 times the mass of the sun, turning almost two solar masses into energy,” says Saulson, referencing Einstein’s famous E = mc² equation. “If the energy produced was visible light, instead of gravitational waves, the collision would have been brighter than all the stars in the universe combined.”

Stefan Ballmer, associate professor of physics at Syracuse, says the mass of the new black hole formed by the merger is 16 million times that of Earth. “Amazing, considering the newfound black hole is only a couple hundred miles across—approximately the distance from Syracuse to New York City,” he adds.

Nitz was in Hannover, examining data from LIGO Livingston, when he helped discover the new signal. “Normally, our analyses alert us of events observed by both [LIGO] detectors, but, on this day, data from LIGO Hanford was not being analyzed automatically,” Nitz says. “I knew that the data, itself, was good quality, so I decided to manually check if there was any sign of a corresponding signal in the other detector. What I saw made my heart jump.”

Nitz confirmed the findings with his colleagues, before reconfiguring the analysis to look for the signal in the recorded data from the two detectors. Again, the data produced a significant event, now known as “GW170104.”

“I alerted the group, beginning a process that woke up a lot of people a bit early in the United States,” says Nitz, a co-author of a paper about the discovery in Physical Review Letters (American Physical Society, 2017). “We compared the waveform to data we got from the detectors’ instruments, hunting for a small signal buried amid the noise. The analysis confirmed both instruments saw the same kind of signal at nearly the same time.”

Peter Saulson, Duncan Brown and Stefan Ballmer, from left

Central to the detection was PyCBC Live, a type of software Nitz developed that helps find signals and study their parameters. Although he began working on the software toward the end of LIGO’s initial phase, Nitz says that being at Syracuse during the project’s five-year upgrade, resulting in Advanced LIGO, helped him “get in on the ground floor” with people looking for gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers.

Ballmer, Brown and Saulson co-lead Syracuse’s Gravitational-Wave Research Group. With more than two dozen members, it is one of the larger, more diverse groups in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and operated by MIT and Caltech, which conceived and built the project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. More than 1,000 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. LIGO partners with the Virgo Collaboration, a consortium including 280 additional scientists throughout Europe supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and Nikhef, as well as Virgo’s host institution, the European Gravitational Observatory. Additional partners are listed at .enter(

(Video) Panel Discussion in NYC on Gravitational Waves Discovery

Keith Kobland — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 14:51:01 +0000

Previous coverage:

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Duncan Brown to Be Inducted as Inaugural Brightman Endowed Professor Oct. 20

Rob Enslin — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 19:16:01 +0000

The is celebrating the appointment of as the inaugural Charles Brightman Professor of Physics.

Duncan Brown

A world-renowned expert in gravitational-wave astronomy and astrophysics, Brown will be honored by Syracuse on Thursday, Oct. 20, in rooms 202-204 of the Physics Building. The program includes an induction ceremony at 3:30 p.m., followed by a presentation by Brown titled “Gravitational-Wave Astronomy: A New Frontier for Exploring the Universe.”

Among those in attendance will be Kent Syverud, chancellor and president of the University; Michele Wheatly, vice chancellor and provost; and Karin Ruhlandt, dean of A&S and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry.

The event is free and open to the public; however, registration is required. Please RSVP to Lisa Balogh by Friday, Oct. 14, at 315.443.1995 or lbalogh@syr.edu.

The professorship has been made possible by a $1.4 million bequest to the Department of Physics by Joseph and Charlotte ’37 Stone, the latter of whom was Brightman’s daughter.Brightman taught in the physics department from 1916-1950.

“Duncan Brown epitomizes the tenacious, entrepreneurial spirit of Charles Brightman, who helped establish the University as a bastion of physics teaching and research,” Ruhlandt says. “Duncan exhibits consistent and outstanding leadership at all levels—with his skill and sustained service in the classroom, his proven track record in scholarly and creative work and his unwavering service to the global research community.”

A Syracuse faculty member since 2007, Brown played a leading role in the (LIGO)’s historic detections of gravitational waves. Both detections, announced earlier this year, were caused by the collisions of two different pairs of black holes more than a billion years ago.   The detections provide the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein, a century ago.

Brown is an authority on finding gravitational waves with LIGO and then extracting the physics from these observations.

Brown participating in LIGO’s announcement of its first gravitational-wave detection.

“Duncan is a major leader in this field, which gives scientists a new way to sense cataclysmic events in the universe,” says Alan Middleton, professor and chair of physics. “He has developed algorithms that ‘hear’ signals from colliding massive objects, such as black holes and neutron stars, and his work with LIGO and the University’s confirms Einstein’s vision of space and time as dynamic and interwoven. This sets the stage for new discoveries about how gravity and matter act under the most extreme conditions in our universe.”

As a result of his LIGO work, Brown is sharing in the receipt of both the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize.

His appointment also exemplifies a steadfast commitment to teaching and mentoring. He is proud of the fact that nearly half of Syracuse’s Gravitational-Wave Group, one of the largest, most diverse teams in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, is made up of graduate students and undergraduates.

Also, he and Professor Stefan Ballmer are partnering with colleagues at California State University, Fullerton, to foster diversity in gravitational-wave astronomy. Their project, underwritten by a $937,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), helps underrepresented students succeed in Syracuse’s Ph.D. program in physics. “It’s forming a pipeline of talent between both institutions,” says Brown, whose work draws on physics, astronomy and information studies. “The implications for teaching and research are enormous.”

A fellow of the American Physical Society and Kavli Foundation, Brown has received a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, a CAREER Award from NSF and a Meredith Professor Teaching Recognition Award from Syracuse. He is a sought-after conference presenter, the principal investigator of more than a dozen sponsored research projects and an accomplished teacher, mentor and author.

Brown earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He joined Syracuse after working as a postdoctoral research associate in Kip Thorne’s group at Caltech.

“I am honored to be appointed the first Brightman Endowed Professor,” Brown says. “The position will help push my teaching and research in new directions. It also says a lot about the spirit of discovery at Syracuse.”

Charles Brightman, c. 1916 (Photo courtesy of Syracuse University Archives)

The Brightman Professorship is a three-year appointment that recognizes and supports early- to mid-career physicists. The professorship is named for the theorist whose teaching career included stints at Wesleyan University; Mount Holyoke College; and DePauw University, where he was the first professor with a Ph.D. in physics (earned from Clark University in Worcester, Mass.). At DePauw, Brightman designed courses in modern theory and alternating current theory.

Brightman’s daughter, Charlotte, was an alumna of A&S and Newhouse who, along with her husband, Joseph, gave generously to the University. They established the Stone charitable trust, which provided income to care for various family members. When the last beneficiary died, Syracuse received the remaining principal.

Physicist Awarded Grant to Assess Authenticity of Gravitational-Wave Signals

Rob Enslin — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 19:29:54 +0000

A physicist in the has been awarded a major grant to continue the search for gravitational waves using the (LIGO).

Peter Saulson

, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics, is the recipient of a three-year, $750,000 grant award from the (NSF), enabling him and members of Syracuse University’s to aid in the search for “ripples in the fabric of spacetime.” He and his colleagues hope to improve the way they recognize brief intervals of time in LIGO data, when observing-run results are of poor quality, or when one of LIGO’s interferometers generates a spurious signal.

“This work will enhance the sensitivity of searches for new signals,” says Saulson, who was instrumental in LIGO’s of gravitational waves last fall. “It will increase our confidence in weak signals that are not instrumental artifacts, but, instead, are actual astronomical events.”

Saulson has more than 35 years’ experience with LIGO. An expert at assessing the authenticity of gravitational-wave signals, he was part of the team that carried out the first engineering design of LIGO. Afterward, Saulson wrote “Fundamentals of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors” (World Scientific Publishing, 1994), the field’s first textbook, and served two terms as a spokesperson for the , a group that he co-founded, consisting of nearly a thousand scientists, engineers and students from 15 countries.

Whereas LIGO’s detections confirm the idea that black holes might form binary pairs, signals from neutron star binaries have not yet been found. “Their signals are so weak that we still haven’t achieved a level of sensitivity [with LIGO] to detect them, but we should be able to find them soon,” says Saulson, who joined Syracuse’s faculty in 1991.

The grant will enable Saulson to develop a technique for distinguishing between genuine black hole binary signals and noise transients mimicking them. In addition to improving existing detection tools, he and his colleagues will build new ones that rely on audio methods to examine data quality in real time. The result will be a library of standard sound files, used for comparison with astronomical events.

“By distinguishing between genuine gravitational-wave signals and instrumental artifacts, LIGO will improve the sensitivity of its searches, thus increasing the believability of its results,” he adds.

Saulson’s project also will foster science education on multiple levels. He looks forward to collaborating with graduate students, undergraduates and postdoctoral fellows, and to finishing his editing of a book on gravitational-wave interferometers. Saulson also will extend a project that he has been doing in consultation with Harry Collins, a noted sociologist of science at Cardiff University (U.K.), about the history of gravitational-wave detection.

“Harry and I look forward to handing off the project to a new scholar,” says Saulson, referring to Daniel Kennefick, an associate professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, known for his contributions to the study of gravitational waves and of the history and sociology of modern physics.

LIGO recently made headlines when its two massive, “L”-shaped detectors—one in Livingston, La., and the other in Hanford, Wash.—picked up faint gravitational wave signals, resulting from two different collisions of black holes. Both detections coincided with the centenary of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which Saulson considers the “most profound physical explanation” of how gravity works.

He, along with professors and , oversees one of LIGO’s largest, most diverse research groups. With more than two-dozen professors and students, the group has been instrumental in the success of LIGO and its $200 million upgrade, Advanced LIGO, which debuted last fall.

The LIGO observatories are funded by NSF, and have been designed, built and operated by Caltech and MIT.

Gravitational Waves Discovery, New Carnegie Classification Underscore Research Excellence at Syracuse

Kathleen Haley — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 16:39:24 +0000

Syracuse University hosted a live broadcast of the NSF press conference about the detection of gravitational waves and held a panel discussion in Goldstein Auditorium at the Schine Student Center Thursday. From left are A. Alan Middleton, professor and chair of physics; Samantha Usman ’16, double major in physics and mathematics; Duncan Brown, the inaugural Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics; Thomas Vo, a Ph.D. student in physics; Peter Saulson, the inaugural Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics; Laura Nuttall, a postdoctoral research associate in physics; and Eric Sedore, associate CIO in Information Technology Services. Photos by Steve Sartori

The announcement: Gravitational waves exist. A major prediction of Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity is correct. And the endeavors of many scientists, including the instrumental work of Syracuse University’s own physicists, has made it happen.

Using a pair of giant laser detectors, researchers saw and heard gravitational waves, ripples in space and time, coming from the collision of two black holes, 1.3 billion light years from earth.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), which led the funding for the technical resources and researchers from across the world to explore this breathtaking area of science, broke the news Thursday in Washington, D.C.

Chancellor Kent Syverud

As an integral part of the research discovery, Syracuse University hosted a live broadcast of the NSF press conference and further explained the discovery in a panel discussion in Goldstein Auditorium at the Schine Student Center.

“People ask me a lot what it means to be a great research university,” Chancellor Kent Syverud said at the event. “[Today] I have a new answer: it is when faculty, students and staff collaborate to help give the whole world a new way to understand the universe.”

That was once thought impossible to detect or prove; scientists took the risks, made the giant leaps and found it possible.

“The discovery of these binary black holes crashing into each other is really just the beginning of a whole new field of gravitational wave discovery,” says Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics. “It’s going to open up many opportunities for new research from Astronuclear physics, to strong field gravity … all these exciting areas that capture the imagination of students. We are just at the beginning here.”

The historic finding marks a new chapter for the University as it reaches for new levels of research distinction, a key priority of the University in its Academic Strategic Plan.

An important boost to the University was also the recent upgrade in research classification from “R2” to “R1,” according to the recently released 2015 Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The classification, examined every five years, distinguishes research institutions based on such factors as research and development expenditures, research staff and number of doctoral conferrals.

Thursday’s physics announcement builds on the significance of the Carnegie classification and the University’s commitment to sustaining and growing important collaborative research with broad impact.

Dean Karin Ruhlandt

“The significance of this discovery speaks to the power of science to solve long-standing, fundamental research questions,” said Karin Ruhlandt, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. “That Syracuse University was a part of this project speaks to our growing prominence as a world-class research university.”

Instrumental in raising the bar is the from the College of Arts and Sciences who made significant contributions to the recent discovery: Brown; Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics; Stefan Ballmer, assistant professor of physics; and a group of nearly two dozen students and research scientists.

All of the work by hundreds of physicists and researchers over decades of study came together at 5:51 a.m. Sept. 14, 2015, when the gravitational waves were detected by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, La., and Hanford, Wash., USA. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the NSF, and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT.

The discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration using data from the two LIGO detectors. Saulson, who has worked in this area for decades, was a co-founder of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC).

Researchers discuss the discovery of gravitational waves with students and visitors following Thursday’s press conference in Goldstein Auditorium in Schine Student Center. There were several displays set up after the event to represent the findings.

The LSC had been in pursuit of what Einstein had proposed: that gravitation was not a force but the result of matter disrupting space and time. The technical resources to fully prove that theory were not capable of detecting such subtle waves, until now.

But this discovery is not an end, but a springboard to even greater understanding and findings.

“It means we’re at the beginning of a new era of astronomy,” Saulson said. “We’re going to see the universe in a whole new way.”

Along with honoring the work of the scientists and their perseverance, Ruhlandt recognized the palpable effect this type of far-reaching research has on students.

“It requires them to be curious and tenacious. It allows them to work side-by-side with terrific scholars, teachers and mentors. And it cultivates in them a hunger for discovery and knowledge that will serve them all their lives,” Ruhlandt said. “Many of our own students helped to support this research. That kind of experiential learning is a defining quality of an outstanding university education.”

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Video: Searching For Gravitational Waves News Conference at Syracuse University

Keith Kobland — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 17:44:08 +0000

Syracuse Scientists Integral to Discovery of Gravitational Waves (Video)

Amy Manley — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 20:33:14 +0000

In this model, two black holes orbit each other, generating gravitational waves.

Scientists in the Department of Physics in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences have been instrumental in the discovery of gravitational waves, confirming a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity. They include Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics; Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics; Stefan Ballmer, assistant professor of physics; and a group of nearly two dozen students and research scientists.

Gravitational Waves Detected 100 Years after Einstein’s Prediction

Rob Enslin — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 20:32:41 +0000

Inside the LIGO Hanford Observatory (Credit: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory)

LIGO Opens New Window on the Universe with Observation of Gravitational Waves from Colliding Black Holes

Syracuse University integral to detection of gravitational waves by LIGO

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For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.

Gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. Physicists have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed.

The gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015, at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (9:51 a.m. UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT. The discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration using data from the two LIGO detectors.

A team of physicists from Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences has been instrumental in the discovery. They include Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics; Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics; Stefan Ballmer, assistant professor of physics; and a group of nearly two dozen students and research scientists.

“Einstein theorized that gravity was not a force, but a curvature of spacetime,” Saulson says. “Think of the two black holes, which we’ve observed, as two bowling balls, rolling along a trampoline. They orbit each other because their mass produces a deep depression in the surface of the trampoline. As the balls orbit, they jiggle the trampoline’s surface, sending out energy in the form of ripples called gravitational waves.”

But that’s where the analogy ends. “In spacetime, the two black holes eventually collide with one another to form a single black hole,” Saulson continues. “The ripples from this cataclysmic event propagate through spacetime at the speed of light. They’ve traveled through the universe for more than a billion years, before reaching us on September 14.”

Brown is a leader in the search for black holes with LIGO. He says LIGO witnessed the two black holes colliding with one another at nearly half the speed of light. “As they collided, some of their mass was converted into energy, according to Einstein’s formula E=mc²,” says Brown, referencing the famous theory of relativity. “The peak power output was about 50 times that of the light emitted by all the stars in the universe. It is these gravitational waves that LIGO has observed.”

Like Brown, Ballmer is highly regarded within the LIGO community. Part of Advanced LIGO’s design team, he spent considerable time in Hanford, building the detector. “I was amazed at how soon into its first observation run that Advanced LIGO made this discovery,” he says. “I was in the LIGO control room the night before for the final detector tuning. When I returned the next morning, there was a buzz in the air. I’ll never forget staring at the first plots, getting goose bumps.”

The discovery was made possible by the enhanced capabilities of Advanced LIGO, a major upgrade that increases the sensitivity of the instruments compared to the first generation LIGO detectors, enabling a large increase in the volume of the universe probed—and the discovery of gravitational waves during its first observation run. The US National Science Foundation leads in financial support for Advanced LIGO. Funding organizations in Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC), and Australia (Australian Research Council) also have made significant commitments to the project. Several of the key technologies that made Advanced LIGO so much more sensitive have been developed and tested by the German-UK-GEO collaboration. Significant computer resources have been contributed by the AEI Hannover Atlas Cluster, the LIGO Laboratory, Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Several universities designed, built and tested key components for Advanced LIGO: The Australian National University, the University of Adelaide, the University of Florida, Stanford University, Columbia University of New York and Louisiana State University.

Although the Earth is theoretically awash in gravitational waves, detecting them is another matter. “Gravitational waves stretch space, but their effect is almost imperceptible,” Saulson says. “It has taken 21st-century technology, a team of hundreds of experts and decades of effort to detect them.”

Part of a LIGO detector, which detects ripples in space-time by using a laser interferometer (Credit: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory)

Each of the two LIGO detectors is a giant laser interferometer. A laser beam is split into two, and then is sent down a pair of 2.5 mile-long tunnels that are perpendicular to one another. Mirrors at the end of the tunnels reflect the light back to where the laser beam was split.

Since both tunnels are the same length, the light takes exactly the same time to travel to the end of each tunnel and back. But if a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it changes the length of the tunnels, causing the light beams to return at different times. By comparing both beams, LIGO is able to measure the stretching of spacetime caused by gravitational waves.

Brown says that LIGO detectors are so sensitive that even the slightest trace of background noise—the hum of an air compressor, the rumbling of traffic, the crashing of an ocean wave, hundreds of miles away—can drown out gravitational-wave signals.

Therefore, LIGO scientists need massive amounts of computing power to find signals in the noise. Brown and his LIGO collaborators use a high throughput computing environment called Orange Grid, along with the Crush supercomputer, housed in the Green Data Center on the University’s South Campus, to detect black holes.

“What we have built is akin to Galileo’s first telescope,” Ballmer says. “We have just taken our first look at the universe in a completely new way. There is so much to learn from gravitational waves in the coming years, and likely many surprises.”

LIGO was originally proposed as a means of detecting these gravitational waves in the 1980s by Rainer Weiss, professor of physics emeritus from MIT; Kip Thorne, Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus; and Ronald Drever, professor of physics emeritus also from Caltech.

A. Alan Middleton, professor and chair of the Department of Physics at Syracuse, considers the discovery a “historic advance in physics.” “Our Gravitational Wave Group has made central contributions to the opening of a new window onto the universe—a window that has already revealed some of the most exotic objects and awe-inspiring events in all of existence,” he says. “Without question, this group’s amazing accomplishments help make the University internationally prominent in research.”

The current generation of Syracuse physicists continues the tradition of leadership in gravity research dating back to Peter Bergmann, one of Einstein’s research assistants and a professor in Syracuse’s physics department from 1947 to 1982. Other University notables include Emeritus Professor Joshua Goldberg, former research scientist Roy Kerr and LIGO spokesperson Gabriela Gonzàlez G’95. In addition to carrying out one of the first calculations of the emission of gravitational waves by binary stars, Goldberg organized a 1957 landmark conference, in which the physical effects of gravitational waves were predicted and the first experiments to detect these waves were conceived. Kerr, who was on the research staff from 1958 to 1960, discovered the solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity, which describes the black holes that LIGO saw. González is professor of physics and astronomy at LSU, as well as one of Saulson’s former Ph.D. students.

“Today is a great day for Syracuse University and for scientific research across the globe,” says Chancellor Kent Syverud. “Thanks to the persistence and insight of our faculty, as well as participating students, we now have a more complete picture of the universe. Their work shines new light on how the universe formed, our place in it and where it’s headed in the future. This accomplishment exemplifies the University’s commitment to being a great place for research, and further positions the University as a global leader in discovery and exploration.”

Karin Ruhlandt, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, agrees: “This discovery is a reflection of the tenacious, entrepreneurial spirit of our Syracuse scientists. It is a milestone in a new era of research for the Department of Physics, the College of Arts and Sciences and Syracuse University, cultivating a state of wonder about the limits of thought and our view of the universe.”

An aerial view of the LIGO Livingston Observatory (Credit: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory)

LIGO research is carried out by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a group of more than a thousand scientists from universities around the United States and in 14 other countries. More than 90 universities and research institutes in the LSC develop detector technology and analyze data; approximately 250 students are strong contributing members of the collaboration. The LSC detector network includes the LIGO interferometers and the GEO600 detector. The GEO team includes scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI), Leibniz Universität Hannover, along with partners at the University of Glasgow, Cardiff University, the University of Birmingham, other universities in the United Kingdom and the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain.

Virgo research is carried out by the Virgo Collaboration, consisting of more than 250 physicists and engineers belonging to 19 different European research groups: six from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; eight from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; two in The Netherlands with Nikhef; the Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland; and the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy.

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Live Press Conference: Searching for Gravitational Waves

Keith Kobland — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 20:26:09 +0000

A century after Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, the National Science Foundation will gather scientists from Syracuse University, Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration to update the scientific community on efforts to detect them. The update will be presented during a live press conference originating from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The national press conference will be followed by remarks and an in-person Q&A session with Syracuse physicists. Thursday morning starting at 10:25 a.m.

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided.

Syracuse Physicists Advance Search for Gravitational Waves

Rob Enslin — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 13:39:50 +0000

LIGO Hanford

Physicists in the are playing a key role in the first observation run of the , after a meticulous five-year rebuild.

Detectors at in Washington state and in Louisiana have begun a new and improved search for gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time, generated by some of the Universe’s most cataclysmic events, such as colliding black holes and exploding stars. For the next three months, scientists at both sites will work around the clock, checking the quality of data and keeping the detectors online to collect as much data as possible.

Peter Saulson

Among them are members of the University’s —i�Գ��ܻ徱�Բ� , the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics. “The past few months have marked the culmination of years of effort to commission Advanced LIGO,” he says. “We’ve been carefully tuning the instruments and conducting practice runs to ensure everything works well.”

Saulson, along with Associate Professor and Assistant Professor , is part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), comprising hundreds of scientists from around the globe, dedicated to making the first direct detection of gravitational waves.

Ballmer, an expert in gravitational wave astronomy, helped upgrade Hanford’s detector. “Every aspect of these machines must be finely tuned, for us to detect these waves,” he says. “On top of that, both observatories are more than 1,800 miles apart. They must work flawlessly to gain the necessary detection confidence.”

Each LIGO observatory contains an L-shaped interferometer with two several-mile-long arms. A powerful laser beam, originating at the elbow, shoots down each arm, before being reflected back to its source by mirrors at both ends. In the process, light from one arm interferes with that of the other arm.

Stefan Ballmer, left

Ballmer says that a passing gravitational wave stretches one arm of the detector while compressing the other, causing the beams to shift in phase with another. “When this happens, light reaches the detector output. LIGO is able to detect these minute phase differences, which are recorded and then used to help determine the origin of the gravitational wave,” he adds.

Brown is optimistic about this new phase of the collaboration, aptly called “Advanced LIGO.” He says the detectors are currently three times more sensitive than the first-generation ones from Initial LIGO, which operated from 2008 to 2010, but did not detect any gravitational wave sources.

“Ultimately, Advanced LIGO will reach a sensitivity that’s 10 times better than Initial LIGO,” says Brown, who looks for signals from pairs of neutron stars and black holes orbiting each other. “At this sensitivity, we expect to see lots of signals every year. Detecting them will enable us to explore black holes in distant galaxies.”

Duncan Brown, center

Co-founded by scientists from Caltech and MIT in 1992, LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation, with support from Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom. Central to LIGO’s international efforts is the LSC, whose spokesperson is , professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University and a graduate of Syracuse’s Ph.D. program.

By combining precision optical instruments with two of the world’s largest vacuum systems, LIGO seeks to redefine the possibilities in astrophysics through the direct detection of gravitational waves.

“Advanced LIGO has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the Universe,” Brown says. “For instance, scientists don’t know where all the gold and platinum in the Universe is from. They could have been made when two neutron stars collided together at a third of the speed of light. Our observations will help answer these types of fundamental questions.”

University Integral to Advanced LIGO Success

Rob Enslin — Thu, 21 May 2015 15:51:40 +0000

Starting in the early 1990s, Peter Saulson, right, led key experiments on LIGO mirror technology.

This week’s inauguration of Advanced LIGO facilities in Richland, Wash., and Livingston, La., is a potent reminder of Syracuse University’s long-standing importance in the international astrophysics community.

For nearly 25 years, the University’s participation in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) project has been one of the ’ biggest success stories. Dozens of faculty, postdocs and graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Physics have joined in the search for gravitational waves of cosmic origins, making LIGO’s Hanford and Livingston observatories a home away from home.

Starting in the early 1990s, Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics, led key experiments on LIGO mirror technology. “Our experiments have shown how LIGO’s mirrors can sit exquisitely still—something that is vital for detecting gravitational waves,” he says. “These waves, or ripples, carry information about their dynamic origins and about the nature of gravity that can’t be obtained by traditional light telescopes.”

Led by Caltech and MIT, the Advanced LIGO project involves institutions from 15 other nations, including Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia. Hundreds of researchers, including members of Syracuse’s own Gravitational Wave Group, have spent more than eight years and $200 million in upgrading equipment at the Hanford and Livingston facilities and building Advanced LIGO detectors. Their ultimate goal is to detect gravitational waves from cosmic collisions of nature’s most dense objects: black holes and neutron stars. That one of the people spearheading this global effort is a former Syracuse Ph.D. student—Gabriela González G’95, professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University, as well as a LIGO spokesperson—is a point of pride for the University.

Stefan Ballmer, left, is one of Advanced LIGO’s core designers.

Duncan Brown, associate professor of physics at Syracuse, says gravitational waves predict Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity because their existence has been inferred, but not directly detected.�� “Our goal is to detect ripples in space-time from sources hundreds of thousands of light years from Earth. This is far outside our own galaxy,” Brown says. “To do this, we need highly sensitive equipment that can pick up tiny gravitational wave signals amid a sea of noise.”

Brown, who joined the University faculty in 2007, is a leader in gravitational-wave astrophysics. He is currently developing computer algorithms to study the physics of black hole and neutron star mergers. “Advanced LIGO’s detections of gravitational waves will allow us to better understand the nature of gravity and matter,” he adds.

Another key player is Stefan Ballmer, assistant professor of physics and one of Advanced LIGO’s core designers. Since last year, he has been using a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to help Advanced LIGO reach its target sensitivity and to develop technology for gravitational wave detectors beyond the scope of the LIGO project. Much of his time is spent at Hanford, bringing the interferometer online and improving its performance.

Closer to home, Ballmer works in his next-generation detector lab in the Physics Building, developing technology needed to upgrade LIGO interferometers. “We aim to use novel quantum-mechanical tricks to further extend the astrophysical reach of the two observatories,” he says.

The University’s 300 tera-FLOP supercomputer benefits an array of researchers involved with the Advanced LIGO project, including Samantha Usman ’16, left, and research scientist Laura Nuttall.

Syracuse faculty and students also benefit from access to a 300 tera-FLOP supercomputer, co-funded by NSF and Syracuse’s Information Technology and Services. Housed in the Green Data Center on South Campus, the computer is used for detecting space-time ripples in Advanced LIGO data and for modeling sources of gravitational waves.

“When LIGO was established, it could measure disturbances up to one one-thousandth of the width of a proton,” Saulson adds. “These new facilities, which we’re celebrating this week, make Advanced LIGO 10 times more sensitive. Syracuse University is proud to have a seat at the table.”

Physicist Wins NSF Award to Advance Scientific Cyberinfrastructure

News Staff — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 14:37:16 +0000

A professor in the has received a major grant to upgrade the cyberinfrastructure used by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to search for gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1913. LIGO is a large-scale international physics experiment designed to detect and study the ripples generated when two black holes crash into each other.

Duncan Brown

, associate professor of physics, is the recipient of a three-year $900,000 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), enabling him to develop robust, data-centric tools to extract the tiny signatures of gravitational waves from LIGO’s data. Brown’s goal is to develop more efficient ways of accessing and mining large data sets, generated by LIGO’s diverse gravitational-wave searches.�� The award comes from the NSF’s Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) program. The goal of the DIBBs program is to accelerate interdisciplinary and collaborative research in scientific domains that are driven by vast amounts of data.

Brown is joined in the effort by co-principal investigators Peter Couvares, a senior research scientist in the ; Jian Qin, a professor in the ; and Ewa Deelman, a research associate professor of computer science and assistant director of science automation technologies at the University of Southern California.

Brown says that as LIGO pushes the boundaries of physics and astronomy it is also redefining scientific data management. More than 800 scientists at over 50 institutions analyze LIGO data—a group collectively known as the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC).  To find gravitational waves, Brown and his colleagues construct “scientific workflows.” These workflows compose and execute the series of computational and data manipulation steps needed to detect the tiny ripples produced as the black holes orbit each other and eventually collide.

Whereas LSC’s current workflow management tools benefit individual scientists, they are less effective with teams of scientists, especially ones scattered across the globe. “Scientific workflows for data analysis are used by a broad community of scientists, including those in astronomy, biology, ecology and physics,” says Brown, an expert in gravitational-wave astronomy and astrophysics. “Making them ‘metadata-aware’ [i.e., involving data about data] is an important step toward producing workflow results that are easy to share, reuse and reproduce.”

“As the number of LSC scientists increases, the ability to discover, share, reuse and verify data from one another’s analyses is impaired,” says Brown. “This is a common problem in many domains.” The solution? Upgrade LIGO’s existing cyber-infrastructure with greatly improved data-management and analysis tools. Qin, for one, is excited about the holistic nature of the project. An expert in the analysis of large, heterogeneous data collections, she looks forward to plying her trade in the natural sciences. “Because [LIGO] is computational intensive, we have to understand how data flows from one point to another, as well as the provenance information [that is] generated along the way,” she says of the project. “It’s important to know the workflows at each stage of a research lifecycle.”

Designed to detect gravitational waves in the visible Universe, LIGO is operated by scientists at the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The detectors themselves are located at the LIGO Livingston Observatory in Louisiana and the LIGO Hanford Observatory in Richland, Wash.    Brown’s project is timely, as construction of second-generation Advanced LIGO detectors is nearing completion and first observing runs are slated for next year.

“Gravitational waves carry information about the changing gravitational fields of distant objects, and we’re on the brink of detecting them for the first time,” says A. Alan Middleton, professor and chair of physics. “The work Duncan is doing for LIGO will extend our understanding of the universe and will build new methods for working with complex information.”

Syracuse University physicists, students help prepare precision silicon detector for Switzerland-based international study measuring properties of B meson particles

News Staff — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:00:01 +0000

Syracuse University physicists, students help prepare precision silicon detector for Switzerland-based international study measuring properties of B meson particles November 12, 2007

Sara Millersemortim@syr.edu

One of the most fragile detectors for the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, a particle physics experiment located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (commonly known as CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, has been successfully installed in its final position, and a group of Syracuse University scientists and graduate students have been an essential part of this achievement.

LHCb is a specialist b-physics experiment aimed at measuring the properties of particles called B mesons, to investigate a physics mystery — why today’s universe is full of matter instead of an equal mix of matter and antimatter. LHCb physicists also study B mesons to search for never before seen particles and physics phenomena. LHCb is one of four large experiments at the LHC in Geneva, the world’s next-generation particle accelerator expected to start up in 2008.

The total LHCb collaboration numbers about 700 scientists from 15 countries. The SU group, headed by SU physics professor Sheldon Stone (above) and with support from the National Science Foundation, joined this international collaboration and has been participating in constructing the LHCb experiment and planning for data analyses.

“When the accelerator starts running in 2008, LHCb will make a series of precise measurements of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter known as CP violation,” says Stone. “The rare decays of B mesons that we will observe will also serve to identify new physics that could be discovered by directly observing new particles by other LHC experiments.”

SU has been deeply involved with many aspects of the LHCb experiment. For example, one member works on electronics configurations and software for the fragile detector, Vertex Locator, or VELO. The VELO is a precise particle-tracking detector that surrounds the proton-proton collision point inside the LHCb experiment. SU scientists made critical test measurements of the VELO detector during its construction and have helped develop software that converts electronic signals from the LHCb experiment to data that researchers will use to probe matter-antimatter asymmetry or search for new phenomena, such as the long-sought Higgs boson and sypersymmetry.

Along with Stone, SU contributors to the project are physics professor Marina Artuso (SU VELO group leader), research assistant professor Raymond Mountain, research assistant professor Jianchun Wang, postdoctoral research associate Gwenaelle Lefeuvre and graduate students Sadia Khalil and Koloina Randrianarivony.

The installation of the VELO into the underground experimental cavern at CERN was a challenging task, and this milestone marks the fruition of the construction phase of the VELO project. The SU group also designed transport modules to move the Vertex Locator detector components safely from the United Kingdom to CERN. “It was a very delicate operation,” says CERN’s Paula Collins, LHCb-VELO project leader. “With its successful completion, the VELO is now in place and ready for physics.”

At the heart of the VELO detector are 84 half-moon-shaped silicon sensors, each one connected to its electronics via a delicate system of more than 5,000 bond wires. These sensors will be located very close to the collision point, where they will play a crucial role in detecting b quarks, to help in understanding tiny but crucial differences in the behavior of matter and antimatter. The sensors are grouped in pairs to make a total of 42 modules, arranged in two halves around the beam line in the VELO vacuum tank. An aluminum sheet just 0.3 mm thick provides a shield between the silicon modules and the primary beam vacuum, with no more than 1 mm of leeway to the silicon modules. Custom-made bellows enable the VELO to retract from its normal position of just 5 mm from the beam line, to a distance of 35 mm. This flexibility is crucial during the commissioning of the beam as it travels around the 27-km ring of the LHC.

“The installation was very tricky, because we were sliding the VELO blindly in the detector,” says Eddy Jans, VELO installation coordinator from NIKHEF. “As these modules are so fragile, we could have damaged them all and not realized it straight away.” However, the verification procedures carried out on the silicon modules after installation indicated that no damage had occurred.

The VELO project has been ongoing for the past 10 years, involving several institutes of the LHCb collaboration, including Nikhef, EPFL Lausanne, Liverpool, Glasgow, CERN, SU and MPI Heidelberg.

CERN is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its member states are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, the United States, the European Commission and UNESCO have observer status.

For more information on the LHCb, visit .

Photos of the LHCb experiment can be found at and .

SU doctoral student will discuss research on gravitational waves and gravitational wave detection in Pathways to Knowledge lecture

News Staff — Tue, 20 Feb 2001 15:00:01 +0000

SU doctoral student will discuss research on gravitational waves and gravitational wave detection in Pathways to Knowledge lectureFebruary 20, 2001Judy Holmesjlholmes@syr.edu

Andri M. Gretarsson, a physics doctoral student, will present “Quiet Detectors for Listening to the Cosmos” during the first Spring 2001 installment of the Pathways to Knowledge Lecture Series at 7:30 p.m. March 6 in Gifford Auditorium of Huntington Beard Crouse Hall. Sponsored by the Department of Science Teaching in The College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School, the lecture series is designed to broaden the academic horizons of Syracuse University undergraduate students by inviting SU Ph.D. candidates to share their research. Gretarsson will discuss his research on gravitational waves and gravitational wave detection. The work Gretarsson has been doing at SU over the past three years is part of a national research project called LIGO (for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). Funded by the National Science Foundation, LIGO is a nationwide collaborative project involving hundreds of scientists from 15 universities who are building instruments to detect gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are types of sounds that are produced during some of the most violent events in the universe, such as exploding stars or supernovas and colliding black holes. Yet once they reach Earth, gravitational waves are so weak that in order to detect them scientists need extremely sensitive and quiet instruments. Gretarsson will talk about the LIGO project in general and will then discuss some of the sources of noise scientists are trying to eliminate in detectors.

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