Resonant Gravitational Wave Detectors

Prof. Weber working on his antenna (c.1965)

Recently, we have been collaborating with LSU to improve the sensitivity of ALLEGRO, the 4-K antenna operating at Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  At present, a single-mode superconducting transducer developed in our laboratory is mounted on ALLEGRO, reading out the signal.  To widen the bandwidth to 100 Hz and improve the detection sensitivity to h < 10^-19, a two-mode superconducting transducer is under construction at Maryland, which will be integrated with a two-stage Quantum Design dc SQUID.

The resonant-mass gravitational wave detector was originally invented in 1959 by late Professor Joseph Weber in our group.  The room-temperature detector developed by Weber in the 1960’s laid the foundation for the later cryogenic antennas of improved sensitivity.  In 1972, Ho Jung Paik, then a graduate student at Stanford University, discovered the resonant transducer concept, which was generalized to a multi-mode transducer by Jean-Paul Richard of our group in 1979.