Mumbai (Maharashtra), 7th April 2023: A project to erect an advanced gravitational-wave detector in Maharashtra at an estimated cost of Rs 2,600 crore was approved by the Union Cabinet on Thursday. The building of the facility is anticipated to be completed by 2030.
In a conversation with The Hindu, Tarun Souradeep, director of the Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, and former spokesperson (science) of LIGO-India, said, “Indian S&T will leap-frog in a number of cutting-edge frontiers of great national relevance, in particular quantum-sensing and metrology.”
It would be built, according to Union minister Jitendra Singh, in the Hingoli district, where 174 acres of land have been purchased.
The observatory, which will be built to the precise specifications of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (LIGO) in Louisiana and Washington in the United States, will be the third of its kind. They will collaborate and work in close association with LIGO-India.
A group of Indian research institutions, American observatories, and a few other foreign partners are working together on the project.
The LIGO is a massive L-shaped device. The “L” arms are each 4 kilometres long. Two laser pulses are simultaneously sent through each arm, bouncing off a mirror at the end before returning to the vertex. A detector determines if the pulses return simultaneously.
The pulses are just out of phase when a gravitational wave goes through the detector. Gravitational waves can be found, recorded, and studied using this signal as well as others.
The Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology will construct LIGO-India, and a memorandum of understanding has been signed with the U.S. National Science Foundation and a number of other national and international scientific organisations. Key laboratory components worth approximately Rs 560 crore will be supplied by the U.S.
