Recycled light improves gravity-wave detection

Abstract

The detection of gravitational waves from coalescing binary neutron stars and other astrophysical sources presents an outstanding challenge to experimental physics. Several major experimental facilities are being built to observe the tiny ripples in space caused by the waves. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics at Garching in Germany, Glasgow University in the UK and Hannover University, also in Germany, has recently demonstrated some ingenious optical techniques on a prototype detector (G Heinzel et al. 1998 Phys. Rev. Lett. 81 5493). The work is a significant step towards achieving the nearly incredible measurement sensitivity aimed for in gravity-wave research-equivalent to detecting a change less than the radius of an atom in a distance as large as that from the Earth to the Sun.

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