How to Catch a Gravitational Wave Rana Adhikari, Assistant Professor of Physics, Caltech

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) has just finished a 2 year science run with a strain sensitivity of better than 10^-21. A team of postdocs and grad students is now tearing apart and rebuilding the 4 km interferometers with techniques and devices developed in the Caltech labs during the science run. These enhancements will increase the volume of the GW-observable universe by an order of magnitude. Three years from now, these upgrades will be upgraded by the installation of Advanced LIGO. This will merge all of the most powerful interferometric technologies we can now envision: 200 W lasers, 40 kg mirrors hanging from multiple glass ribbons, vibration isolation by a factor of 10 billion, hundreds of feedback loops, and the biggest vacuum system in the world. I will describe these machines as well as plans for the future.