After 40 years of meticulous calculations, instrument adjustments, and trial and error, three generations of scientists unlocked the code to Einstein’s century-old General Theory of Relativity. Even before the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories’ groundbreaking Sept. 14 discovery, the University has played a key role as a major project collaborator.
LIGO has united different demographics of the University community by connecting founding scientists with alumni and graduate students alike. The extensive project also put the University on the world map as a progressive, research-based institution.
LSU alumni Ryan DeRosa said the most unique aspect of the project was its vast, boundary-blurring scope.
“All the experiments I worked on in my master’s were five, six people at most,” he said. “Here we’re talking dozens of people working on the detector and a thousand people working the experiment as a whole, straight across the whole planet.”
With a “teamwork environment,” DeRosa said LIGO offered a varied day-to-day routine. He said the Livingston site operates in three modes — installation, commission and data collection.
Installation of the instrument, he said, involves a nine-to-five, physically intense workload. Graduate student Terra Hardwick, involved with the Physical Environment Monitoring system, participated in this sector of job responsibilities.
Hardwick said the first half of her days typically included running cables, measuring sensor placements or blasting music on loudspeakers so they could determine the effect of noise on the microphones and the interferometer.
The second half, she said, was spent on a computer screen plotting data.
“I feel fortunate that I was able to start my work with LIGO during the upgrade time when I could do some hardware related work in the heart of such a massive and complex detector,” Hardwick said.
DeRosa’s duties were more commission-focused, during which he improved the detector.
Also from the Livingston site, LSU physics graduate student Marissa Walker worked on data analysis. Though her daily work consists of “poring over plots and graphs,” Walker said communication across sites was key for an experiment of LIGO’s magnitude.
“There’s a lot of making sure we keep updated with each other on emails and teleconferences, being on the call, communicating with other people about what we’re doing,” she said.
It was at “the very beginning of [their] planned data taking” when DeRosa said researchers heard the Sept. 14 gravitational waves. When the signal arrived, DeRosa said it was “so loud and so clear” they thought the sound was just a “beautiful calculation” engineered by fellow scientists.
After realizing the sound was produced by outer space, he said the discovery was “a bit surreal.” Hardwick said the mathematical element of the detection felt more like “a gentle sigh of relief than a climactic surprise ending.”
From a University physics lab, graduate student Jonathan Cripe worked on research and development for the next generation of LIGO detectors. While not as invested in day-to-day operations, he said he looks forward to potential telescope partnerships and machine perfections for the future of LIGO.
Cripe said discovering the universe’s gravitational waves was a “big relief” for both the researchers and the scientific community as a whole. He said the University holds a great geographic advantage within the scientific field.
“[Louisiana] is one of only a couple places in the world where they can do this type of research,” Cripe said.
LSU alumna Anamaria Effler, who has been with the LIGO project for the past decade, said she chose to pursue the University for graduate school based on its proximity to the Livingston site. Like DeRosa, she worked on the commissioning phase of the project.
Effler said she would go into work thinking she would do one thing, and leave finishing something completely different.
“My mantra is that you go into the lab when you feel like it, but you can’t choose when you leave,” she said.
From a scientific perspective, Hardwick said people now have a new way of understanding the universe by hearing as well as seeing.
“This detection really epitomizes the huge results that can come from continued dedication to fund scientific projects,” Hardwick said.

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Courtesy of Terra Hardwick

Terra Hardwick stands in the laboratory before a full day of research.