Munawar Karim
Compact Gravity Wave Detector
Two novel features characterize the
detector design: (i) the arms are 10 cm long
(ii) the mirrors are rigidly mounted to the
interferometer base. A compact design is
achieved by using sampling techniques and
digital signal processing algorithms.
Instead of taking a small number of samples of
long duration, a large number of short samples are taken.
As a result the
interferometer arms can be as small as 10 cm.
Interaction of a gravity wave with light beams
in an interferometer yields two
independent contributions, time and space
components, to the time delay in the
recombined beams. Mounting the mirrors rigidly
reduces the optimum sensitivity by a factor
of two while vaslty easing the requirements
on vibration isolation. These two
features allow an interferometer of table-top
dimensions to be sensitive to gravity waves of
amplitude 10-22: limited by the
shot-noise of the laser source alone, but sufficient
to detect gravity waves from as far as the Virgo cluster.
For details see
gr-qc/0209015.
Back to ECGM6 Program