UF professor chosen to head major gravitational wave experiment

February 19, 2007

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A massive international effort aimed at making the first direct observations of gravitational waves now has a University of Florida professor at its helm.

David Reitze, a professor of physics, has been elected spokesperson of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration. The job is akin to that of a scientific chief executive.

“This is a very exciting time for the LIGO Science Collaboration because our instruments have become sufficiently sensitive to the point where we are confident they can detect gravitational waves,” Reitze said. “To put it as simply as I can, it is an honor and a privilege to serve during this exciting period.”

Reitze is the second UF faculty member and physicist chosen to head a major international scientific collaboration in recent years. The other is Jacobo Konigsberg, who was selected last year as spokesperson for the world’s largest high energy physics project, the Collider Detector at Fermilab collaboration near Chicago.

“It is very unusual for a single university to have spokespersons in two major international collaborations at the same time,” said Guenakh Mitselmakher, a distinguished professor of physics. “It shows that UF’s physics department is regarded very highly by its peers at other major universities.”

The LIGO Science Collaboration consists of 500 people from 45 scientific institutions and seven countries and oversees the scientific mission of two U.S. observatories (LIGO) and one European Observatory seeking to detect gravitational waves, elusive ripples in space-time first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916.

LIGO was built with $300 million from the National Science Foundation and is managed by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each observatory contains highly specialized detectors called laser interferometers capable of measuring ultrasmall displacements caused by passing gravitational waves.

Although the LIGO observatories in Washington and Louisiana first became operational in 2002, it wasn’t until 2005 that the instruments began performing with enough sensitivity to detect the waves, Reitze said.

Chances remain small for detection with the current instruments, but anticipated continued improvements to the instruments will make it steadily more likely in the next few years, Reitze said. That’s exciting for physicists because observing gravitational waves directly raises the possibility of answering questions about the origin of the universe, black holes and the nature of space and time, he said.

Reitze said that some gravitational waves date back to the Big Bang, the primeval explosion that brought about the universe. As a result, observing these waves would allow physicists to peer into the universe just fractions of a second after it came into being.

“Our direct knowledge of the Big Bang ends about 380,000 years after it happened, and the reason for that is that light and the other things we measure only came into being then,” Reitze said. “Gravitational waves existed right at the start. If we could probe them directly, we would be able to probe the origin of the universe exactly at the moment of its birth. LIGO cannot directly access these relic waves, but we can begin to put limits on what fraction of the universe is made of gravitational waves”

Because black holes emit gravitational waves as other stars merge into them, observing gravitational waves would also allow physicists to learn about how gravity behaves near black holes, revealing more about the nature of space and time, Reitze said.

In his new position, Reitze will serve as the public face of the collaboration, and he will be in charge of maintaining its scientific agenda. As the collaboration’s third spokesperson, he will serve a two-year term.