A team of Syracuse University professors were part of the 1000-person group that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Nobel Prize was officially awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne last week “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves,” according to a Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press release.

Stefan Ballmer, an associate professor of physics at SU; Duncan Brown, the Charles Brightman Endowed Professor of Physics; and Peter Saulson, the Martin A. Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics, are celebrating their role in LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

While Saulson, Ballmer and Brown were not direct recipients of the award, they played a role in contributing to the overall project.

Built and run by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “LIGO observes the universe with waves of gravity instead of electromagnetic waves,” Saulson said in an email. “It took decades to develop and now is the most sensitive measuring device ever constructed.”

The project was monumental because it confirmed black holes and gravitational waves exist — predictions Albert Einstein theorized a century ago, Saulson said. The method of measuring gravitational waves will allow astrophysicists to research the universe in a completely new way.

“It’s the start of a new era in astrophysics,” Ballmer said.

Ballmer, who works more on the hardware side of LIGO, described it as “a very precise ruler.” The waves it “heard” originated more than a billion light years away from Earth.

The team has put years of work into LIGO. The turning point came on Sept. 14, 2015, when LIGO documented the first gravitational wave signal.

“When we first saw this, we thought it was too good to be true. It looked so clean and clear,” Ballmer said. “Within a couple of days, it really sunk in that this was real now.”

LIGO’s findings were instrumental because no one knew what happened when black holes collided. The team plans on recording an event every week to gather more data, Ballmer said.

Though the LIGO sites are located in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, “a big portion of the computers used in analyzing LIGO data are at Syracuse; many important developments in LIGO technology came from experiments made in the sub-basement lab in the Physics Building at SU,” Saulson said.

Graduate students Derek Davis and undergraduates Diane Portugal and Laurel White, among others, are working with Ballmer and Saulson to research the LIGO data and what it means for the future of astrophysics.

“If the excitement about gravitational waves gets more students involved in research, that would be the best possible outcome,” Saulson said.

The work with LIGO is far from over. Because it is a tool for indicating and recording gravitational waves, it is only the beginning for how scientists will perceive the universe, the professors said.

“There’s nothing cooler than this,” Saulson said when asked if he would change his research course.

Ballmer has at least a two-year plan for researching with LIGO. He said, “it will be a busy time with a lot of new things coming.”

Published on October 9, 2017 at 10:40 pm

Contact Jessi: jmsopori@syr.edu