Tiny Crystal Device Could Boost Gravitational Wave Detectors to Reveal the Birth Cries of Black Hole
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
In 2017, astronomers witnessed the birth of a black hole for the first time. Gravitational wave detectors picked up the ripples in spacetime caused by two neutron stars colliding to form the black hole, and other telescopes then observed the resulting explosion.
But the real nitty-gritty of how the black hole formed, the movements of matter in the instants before it was sealed away inside the black hole's event horizon, went unobserved. That's because the gravitational waves thrown off in these final moments had such a high frequency that our current detectors can't pick them up.
If you could observe ordinary matter as it turns into a black hole, you would be seeing something similar to the Big Bang played backwards. The scientists who design gravitational wave detectors have been hard at work to figure out how improve our detectors to make it possible.
Today our team is publishing a paper that shows how this can be done. Our proposal could make detectors 40 times more sensitive to the high frequencies we need, allowing astronomers to listen to matter as it forms a black hole.
[...] Five years ago physicists realised you could solve the problem of insufficient sensitivity at high frequency with devices that combine phonons with photons. They showed that devices in which energy is carried in quantum packets that share the properties of both phonons and photons can have quite remarkable properties.
These devices would involve a radical change to a familiar concept called "resonant amplification". Resonant amplification is what you do when you push a playground swing: if you push at the right time, all your small pushes create big swinging.
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