.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

2Physics Quote:
"Many of the molecules found by ROSINA DFMS in the coma of comet 67P are compatible with the idea that comets delivered key molecules for prebiotic chemistry throughout the solar system and in particular to the early Earth increasing drastically the concentration of life-related chemicals by impact on a closed water body. The fact that glycine was most probably formed on dust grains in the presolar stage also makes these molecules somehow universal, which means that what happened in the solar system could probably happen elsewhere in the Universe."
-- Kathrin Altwegg and the ROSINA Team

(Read Full Article: "Glycine, an Amino Acid and Other Prebiotic Molecules in Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko"
)

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Interferometric Detection of Gravitational Waves :
5 Needed Breakthroughs -- Jean-Yves Vinet

Jean-Yves Vinet[We are continuing our feature on '5-Breakthroughs' -- this time with inputs from Prof. Jean-Yves Vinet ....

Jean-Yves Vinet was involved in the French-Italian
Virgo project for the detection of gravitational waves since the very beginning (Year 1984!) as a collaborator of Alain Brillet, who, with A. Giazotto, promoted the idea of the Virgo project.

Regarding terrestrial instruments like Virgo or LIGO, his interest lies mainly in the theory of the instrument itself (optics, thermal noise, R&D for advanced instruments...). He is also involved in NASA's proposed space-based detector LISA where again he finds his interest in the instrument itself (transfer function, low frequency regime, time delay interferometry...) and also the data Analysis issues.
Jean-Yves is currently a "Directeur de Recherche" at C.N.R.S, France. He is a member of the LISA International Science Team and also of the Fundamental Physics committee of the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (the French space agency). He was a professor at Ecole Nationale de Techniques Avancées (Paris) (Laser Physics, 1991-99) and then a searcher at Département d'Astrophysique Relativiste (Observatoire de Paris-Meudon) (1999) and thereafter a searcher at Artemis (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Nice, France) since 2000.

He teaches a master's course on Experimental Gravitation at Université de Nice-Sophia-Antipolis.
-- 2Physics.com Team]

"In my opinion, important breakthroughs would be for instance:

1) Find an optical design matched to light beams homogeneously distributed on the mirror surfaces in order to reduce the spurious thermal effects, the thermal noise and the thermodynamical noise.

2) Then find a laser able to produce such beams (fiber laser).

3) Adopt the continuous detection scheme (no modulation).

4) Organize a full cooperation among existing antennas (this seems to be on the way).

5) Get more funding for R&D (Europe!)"

Relevant links:     Virgo Project     LISA

Labels: ,


0 Comments:

Post a Comment