Pune: LIGO-India must adopt newer technologies for improved sensitivity and not rely only on ageing components supplied by the United States, said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory, here on Tuesday.Reitze was in Pune to attend the biannual gathering of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration — comprising gravitational-wave researchers from across the globe — at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) here. This is the first time India is hosting the biannual conference, which will conclude on Sept 25.While delivering a talk on Tuesday, Reitze pointed out that several of the detector components earmarked for LIGO-India were built between 2011 and 2014. He said these have since been superseded by newer, improved components — electronics, optics and lasers, especially squeezing lasers, which were not part of the components set aside for LIGO-India.Reitze said the components meant for LIGO-India will be delivered as part of the India-US partnership, but urged researchers to incorporate current technology so that the observatory can achieve optimum sensitivity when it becomes operational.“We in the US have plans for one more upgrade of our detector, which should improve the sensitivity by a factor of maybe two or more. No reason why India should also not upgrade. It is just a question of will,” Reitze said.LIGO-India, coming up on 100 acres of land in Hingoli, would join the ranks of two facilities operational in the US. The observatory is expected to be unveiled by 2030.The project gathered steam after the two operational LIGO observatories, on Sept 14, 2015, detected a 0.2-second ‘murmur’ from the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away. The event converted three times the Sun’s mass into gravitational waves, confirming Einstein’s prediction of ripples in space-time and opening a new way to study the universe, including its age, composition and dark matter. LIGO at Hingoli would be crucial to these investigations.On Wednesday, LIGO-India and IUCAA will host a panel discussion open to the public and release the second edition of a book on gravitational waves authored by professors Ajit Kembhavi and Pushpa Khare.
