Thin Film Helps Detect Gravitational Waves

Thin Film Helps Detect Gravitational Waves

I t’s only a slight exaggeration to say that a few layers of molecules helped make possible one of the most important physics observations of the past several decades. Those layers of metal oxideswhich barely add up to 2 μm in thicknesscoat the highly specialized mirrors that make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. The coatings make LIGO’s mirrors exceptional...

If light waves are stretched by gravitational waves, how can we use light as a ruler to detect gravitational waves?

Exploiting large-scale correlations to detect continuous gravitational waves.

Fully coherent searches (over realistic ranges of parameter space and year-long observation times) for unknown sources of continuous gravitational waves are computationally prohibitive. Less expensive hierarchical searches divide the data into shorter segments which are analyzed coherently, then detection statistics from different segments are combined incoherently. The novel method presented h...

Stability of Compressive and Undercompressive Thin Film Travelling Waves

Recent studies of liquid lms driven by competing forces due to surface tension gradients and gravity reveal that undercompressive traveling waves play an important role in the dynamics when the competing forces are comparable. In this paper we provide a theoretical framework for assessing the spectral stability of compressive and undercompressive traveling waves in thin lm models. Associated wi...

Electromagnetic waves in a Josephson junction in a thin film.

We consider a one-dimensional Josephson junction in a superconducting film with the thickness that is much less than the London penetration depth. We treat an electromagnetic wave propagating along this tunnel contact. We show that the electrodynamics of a Josephson junction in a thin film is nonlocal if the wave length is less than the Pearl penetration depth. We find the integro-differential ...