It was a great moment for physicists and scientists around the world in 2016 when one of the greatest ever scientific discoveries was announced. Although technically the first gravitational waves were detected in 2015, it wasn’t until further detections were made in 2016 that scientists finally conceded they did exist and that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity could finally be proved. Following on from that, scientists also discovered that as well as a great detector LIGO is the best producer of gravitational waves.
“When we optimize LIGO for detection, we also optimize it for emission [of gravitational waves],” said Belinda Pang, the physicist from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. One of the features of gravitational waves is that they stretch out space, and using ultra sensitive twin detectors, LIGO can detect this stretching. Physicist then deduced that if they could detect gravitational waves through LIGO, then surely they could produce them using LIGO. Fan Zhang, a physicist at Beijing Normal University, said, “The fundamental thing about a detector is that it couples to gravitational waves. When you have a coupling, it’s going to go both ways.”
The idea of quantum mechanics says that certain objects such as electrons can be in two places at once. Using this theory, physicists think they can coax macroscopic objects into a similar state and are turning to LIGO to do it. In doing so they could measure how long it took before decoherence occurred and could then observe what role gravity plays in these quantum states between macroscopic objects. The team is under no illusion that they have a difficult task ahead of them if they want to achieve this, but they remain hopeful. Any further quantum information they discover could help in the race to build a quantum computer and essentially give us a deeper understanding of the universe.
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