UPDATED: Oct. 19, 2017 at 2:02 p.m.

Graduate students in the physics department at Syracuse University worked on the project that discovered gravitational waves and neutron star collisions — major breakthroughs in general relativity.

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss for the discovery of gravitational waves last year by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

The university recognized Stefan Ballmer, an associate professor of physics at SU; Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics; and Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics for their part in the project.

Those professors were not the only members of the SU community who played a part with LIGO’s two major discoveries over the last two years.

Graduate students in the physics department worked on the LIGO project, modeling black holes and calibrating the LIGO instrument. They received recognition Monday when a member of the audience at the New Age of Discovery event asked panelists why only men were being recognized.

Ari Fair and Swetha Bhagwat — a graduate student and Ph.D. student in the physics department, respectively — have worked on the LIGO project for years, contributing to major findings on gravitational waves, black holes and neutron star collisions.

“It’s a privilege to see something as big as this happen, especially two of them, in your graduate career,” Bhagwat said. “It’s really huge.”

Bhagwat began her work with LIGO in India while she was in graduate school, studying black holes and doing research projects with a professor there.

With LIGO, she models how black holes look and act when they’re on the path to collision, which she said is crucial to how the LIGO instrument works.

Back in India, Bhagwat said people told her it may take her entire graduate career to find anything with LIGO. Gravitational waves were discovered in her third year at SU.

She said she plans to continue her postdoctoral work with LIGO.

“It opens a lot more opportunities of doing different kinds of physics,” Bhagwat said.

Fair said they concentrated on creating future upgrades for the LIGO instrument to make it more sensitive to detecting black holes and neutron star collisions. The instrument, they said, is not as sensitive as researchers would like it to be.

Scientists believe more events like these are happening, Fair said, but the instrument isn’t sensitive enough to detect them happening millions of light years away.

Calibrating the machine to be more sensitive is a challenge, they said. LIGO uses mirrors and lasers to detect gravitational waves through vibrations, but everything with a temperature vibrates. The instrument will pick up on vibrations from earthquakes on the other side of the earth, trucks passing by the observatory and even a bouncing ball in the control room, Fair said.

“I’m a scientist and I work in ‘physics,’ which, for a lot of people, saying that makes them scared or turned off,” Fair said, adding that the scientists were shocked by the public’s reaction to gravitational wave findings.

They said they received calls from friends and family they hadn’t spoken to for nearly a decade when the gravitational waves discovery was announced. Fair said it’s hard for people to get excited about physics, but that black holes and lasers are “pretty good ways to get people’s attention.”

Bhagwat said: “It’s like one mission is done, but there is still so much more to do. “There is no lack of work at all.”

A full list of graduate students and other members of the SU community who worked with LIGO can be found here.

CLARIFICATION: In a previous version of this post, the number of Syracuse University graduate students who worked with LIGO was unclear.

Published on October 18, 2017 at 11:56 pm

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