Duncan Brown was sitting at the breakfast table checking emails on his iPad when he found out that the research team he was a part of had discovered an Albert Einstein theory to be true.

Though the preliminary assessment showed the data was not affected by a glitch, Brown said he thought it was just a system test. Brown and his team researchers conducted a series of tests, such as instrumental checks and statistical and computational analyses on the data detected.

“Gradually, over that week I began to convince myself that it was real,” he said.

Brown is one of three Syracuse University professors who were among a group of scientists that successfully observed and recorded, for the first time in history, the sound of two black holes colliding, producing ripples known as gravitational waves. The discovery proves the last part of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, according to The New York Times.

Peter Saulson, Stefan Ballmer and Brown — all professors in the physics department at SU — collaborated with scientists around the world as part of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a project involving hundreds of scientists that seeks to detect gravitational waves. LIGO is operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology.

SU has the oldest LIGO Scientific Collaboration lab group outside the LIGO labs at MIT and CalTech.

Researchers detected the gravitational waves on Sept. 14, 2015 at 5:51 EDT. After months of data checking, members of LIGO and scientists in the Virgo Collaboration in Europe published a peer-reviewed journal article on Thursday.

Brown’s testing yielded a final result on Oct. 5, 2015, which confirmed the existence of gravitational waves.

Most of Brown’s life has been working toward this discovery, but he said he tries to find time for his family. He said one cannot be happy at work if one is unhappy at home.

“I have a 3-year-old daughter,” Brown said. “She’s too young to care about gravitational waves right now. Either she wants to hear children’s stories or you read her children’s stories.”

Brown said his wife knows him so well that she can correlate the dates in their relationship to what was happening in the LIGO project.

When asked about the future of LIGO, Brown said this is only just the beginning.

“The future is to probe the nature of gravity, which is one of the least understood forces in the universe.”

 

 

Peter Saulson

Saulson received the news of LIGO detection of gravitational waves on the night of Sept. 14, 2015, after celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.

“My email inbox was just a full of whole bunch of messages with the same subject line, ‘Very interesting event on ER8,’” Saulson said.

Within LIGO, Saulson’s job is known as “detect characterization,” a procedure that assesses the authenticity of signals detected, making sure signals do not originate as a result of malfunctioning.

Along with postdoctoral students and a small subgroup from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration lab at SU, Saulson made a catalogue listing all different ways in which interferometers make signals so that his team can make a comparison between the list, and the waves observed after the first detection.

His team checked various kinds of false signal mechanisms and ruled them all out, validating the signal was not from malfunctioning of the LIGO devices.

 

Saulson subsequently submitted the data to the detection committee put together by LIGO for further screening.

Saulon’s relationship with LIGO traces back to 1981 after he finished his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University.

He worked at MIT alongside Rainer Weiss, the physicist who first suggested building LIGO in 1972. There, Saulson helped consult with engineers to plan out what would be involved in starting the gravity wave interferometer project, which became a first blueprint of LIGO.

He moved to Syracuse in the 1990s when he stumbled upon an advertisement from the SU physics department, which was undergoing a major expansion and looking for five new faculty members. He became an associate professor shortly thereafter.

He then moved to Livingston, Louisiana, where he served as an interferometer commissioning leader at the LIGO Livingston Observatory for a year in 2000.

Saulson returned to SU and became physics department chair in July 2010 and served until June 2013.

Stefan Ballmer

Four days before the gravitational waves were originally detected, Stefan Ballmer flew to the LIGO Observatory in Hanford, Washington, to fine tune the LIGO interferometer, a machine built to detect gravitational waves, at the lab. He worked throughout the weekend.

Around midnight on Sept. 14, he left for the night and kept the machine running.

Around 2:51 a.m. PDT, the machine detected the gravitational waves.

He found out about the potential discovery when returned to the observatory in the morning.

Ballmer described the discovery as “a new start.”

Born and raised in Switzerland, Ballmer said he was a boy who was fond of building model airplanes. He became fascinated with science through the TV series “Cosmos” with Carl Sagan during the 1980s. At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Ballmer said he became so involved in theoretical physics and cosmology that he skipped chemistry class to attend a class on general relativity.

After obtaining his master’s degree in physics, Ballmer moved to the U.S. in 2001 to pursue his Ph.D. at MIT — eager to be part of the LIGO project.

Ballmer spent a significant amount of time working at the LIGO Hanford Observatory. From June 2013 to July 2014, he took a research leave to work full time there, and spent about one-third of the last year away from Syracuse.

Ballmer was in charge of integrating the various subsystems like laser, position and alignment control of all mirrors into a working interferometer, having to achieve the desired interferometer sensitivity.

Ballmer said he worked for about 16 hours a day and mostly at night, since there are less human activities in the environment then.

“(The job) is really immersive to the point that, you know, you sometimes dream about it,” Ballmer said.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, Stefan Ballmer’s research leave was misstated. Ballmer’s research leave was June 2013 to July 2014. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on February 14, 2016 at 11:29 pm

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