Instrumentation is the foundation of OzGrav’s research. Under the direction of OzGrav Deputy Director Professor David McClelland, we are pursuing novel instrumentation research under the following Key Programs.
Key Programs
OPTIMISATION
The goal of this project is to maximise the sensitivity of advanced GW detectors by suppressing quantum noise, reducing coating losses and understanding and reducing control noises, thereby increasing the rate of detections by more than an order of magnitude. The advanced detectors include Advanced LIGO (aLIGO), the French/Italian observatory Advanced Virgo and the Japanese KAGRA detector. By mid 2020s, the new LIGO-India detector will be added to the network. We will make major contributions to this international effort to ensure our continuing priority access to exciting new astrophysical data, the bedrock upon which GW science is built.
We will focus on three key outcomes: 1. increasing the circulating power and the enhanced injection of squeezing to improve quantum noise limited sensitivity; 2. reducing the impact of coating thermal noise in the mid-frequency band; and 3. reducing the impact of control noise and unknown noise sources in the 10 Hz to 100 Hz band.
FUTURE TECH
The goals of this project IS to develop breakthrough technologies that will enable third generation ground-based GW detectors, create a conceptual design for a kilohertz GW detector, and lay the technological foundations for Australia to participate in a space-based GW detection such as LISA. These remarkable future detectors operate in complementary frequency bands ranging from 10 mHz to 5 kHz, will answer key questions about the workings of the Universe: from how galaxies form and evolve to how matter behaves at extreme densities and temperatures.OzGrav is positioned to contribute enabling technologies to these future detectors so that Australia benefits from the ground-breaking science they will enable. The detectors are also compelling in their own right as they push the limits of optical measurement technology and probe fundamental science. Future detectors may make it possible to place a human-size optomechanical system into its quantum ground state, potentially allowing investigation of how gravitational fields affect quantum systems.