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There are precision measurements, and then there's the laser interferometer gravitational wave

observatory. In each of LIGO's twin gravitational wave detectors, laser beams

bounce back and forth down the four kilometer arms of a giant L. When a gravitational

wave passes through, the length of one arm changes relative to the other by less

than the width of a proton. Measuring these minuscule differences is a sensitivity akin to sensing

the distance to the star Alpha Centauri down to the width of a human hair. The design of the

machine was decades in the making, as physicists needed to push every aspect

to its absolute physical limits.

Construction began in 1994 and took more than 20 years, including a four-year shutdown to improve

the detectors.

LIGO finally detected its first gravitational wave in 2015.

It was a ripple in the spacetime fabric coming from the far away collision of a pair of black holes.

Rana Adikari, a physicist at Caltech, led the detector optimization team in the mid-2000s. He and a handful of collaborators

painstakingly honed parts of the LIGO design, exploring the contours of every limit that stood in the way of a more

sensitive machine. But after the 2015 detection, Atacari wanted to see if they could improve upon LIGO's design.

For instance, could they enable it to pick up gravitational waves in a broader band of frequencies?

Such an improvement would enable LIGO to see merging black holes of different sizes, as well as potential surprises.

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