Another interferometer with arms of the same length is under construction at Kamioka in Japan.
GEO600 (because the interferometer arms are 600 metres long) started taking scientifically useful data in Hanover last month.
The interferometer in Japan is being built underground and will be kept at extremely low temperatures to minimise stray vibrations.
Building a more accurate ground-based interferometer is impossible because of atmospheric turbulence, which makes the stars seem to dance around.
They will be located 60 metres apart on the mountain of Las Campanas, and they, too, will eventually be joined together as an interferometer.
But a vortex mask requires only one telescope whereas an interferometer needs at least two, in order to combine, and thus cancel, several images.
The Keck interferometer, now under construction at Mauna Kea on Hawaii, will combine four 1.8-metre telescopes to mimic a 100-metre telescope in just this way.
It can also be done using an instrument called an interferometer.
ECONOMIST: A way to detect Earth-sized planets around other stars
In addition to its use as a single instrument, the telescope is a key element of the UK's Multi-Element Radio-Linked Interferometer Network (Merlin) high-resolution radio-imaging array.
So Stojkovic and Mureika have reasoned that the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a planned international gravitational observatory, should not detect any gravitational waves emanating from the lower-dimensional epochs of the early universe.
In addition to operating four small research telescopes at the mesa, the observatory is also in partnership with the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) and the Naval Research Lab (NRL) in operating and providing maintenance for the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer (NPOI).
Applications tested included the heavyweights of the government scientific community from projects such as MG-RAST (a metagenomics analysis server), the Joint Genome Institute, the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).
FORBES: Cloud Computing Not Quite Ready for the Lab: US Government Report
Even if experimenters bounce the beams to and fro to increase the effective length of an interferometer's arms to more than 100 kilometres, the expected difference in length between the two beams' paths still amounts to less than a hundred-millionth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
As the leader of the experimental gravity group at Columbia, he is looking into what happens when two black holes or neutron stars merge in the distant universe, and is collaborating with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, a facility funded by the National Science Foundation and located in Louisiana and Hanford, Wash. that aims to detect cosmic gravitational waves.
应用推荐