LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory

Abstract

The goal of the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is to detect and study gravitational waves of astrophysical origin. Direct detection of gravitational waves holds the promise of testing general relativity in the strong-field regime, of providing a new probe of exotic objects such as black hole and neutron stars, and of uncovering unanticipated new astrophysics. LIGO, a joint Caltech-MIT project supported by the National Science Foundation, operates three multi-kilometer interferometers at two widely separated sites in the United States. These detectors are the result of decades of worldwide technology development, design, construction, and commissioning. They are now operating at their design sensitivity, and are sensitive to gravitational wave strains smaller than 1 part in 1E21. With this unprecedented sensitivity, the data are being analyzed to detect or place limits on gravitational waves from a variety of potential astrophysical sources.

50 pages, 14 figures

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• High-frequency corrections to the detector response and their effect on searches for gravitational waves
• Reducing False Alarms in Searches for Gravitational Waves from Coalescing Binary Systems

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Mergers of Stellar-Mass Black Holes in Nuclear Star Clusters
• Comparison of high-accuracy numerical simulations of black-hole binaries with stationary phase post-Newtonian template waveforms for Initial and Advanced LIGO
• The Future of low Energy Photon Experiments
• Matters of Gravity, The Newsletter of the Topical Group in Gravitation of the American Physical Society, Volume 32, Fall 2008