Virgo interferometer

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"VIRGO" redirects here. For other uses, see Virgo (disambiguation).
The Virgo experiment
File:Logo-virgo.jpg
250px
  Founding countries
  Countries which have joined the Virgo experiment later
Formation 1993
Type International scientific collaboration
Purpose Gravitation wave detection
Headquarters EGO
Location
Coordinates Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
Region
 Italy
Fields Basic research
Membership
 CNRS (France), INFN (Italy), NIKHEF (Netherlands), POGRAW (Poland) and RMKI (Hungary)
Spokesperson
 Fulvio Ricci
Affiliations LVC (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration)
Budget
 About ten million euros per year
Staff
 More than 320 people contribute to the Virgo experiment
Slogan Listening to the cosmic whisper
Website www.virgo-gw.eu

Virgo is a giant scientific instrument, build near Pisa in Italy. The associated international scientific collaboration includes laboratories from five countries: France and Italy (the two countries behind the project), the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary. The Virgo detector is a Michelson interferometer isolated from external disturbances (mirrors and instrumentation all suspended, laser beam under vacuum) and whose both arms are three km long. Virgo aims at achieving a direct detection of the gravitational waves predicted by general relativity.

Other detectors similar to Virgo are currently being operated in the world, in particular the two LIGO interferometers built in the USA: Hanford (Washington State) and Livingston (Louisiana). Since 2007, Virgo and LIGO are bound by an agreement[1] which includes sharing the data recorded by the different detectors, such as a common publication policy for the results obtained by analyzing jointly these data. This cooperation is necessary: the giant interferometric detectors are not directional (they survey the whole sky) and they are looking for signals which are weak, infrequent and buried into instrumental noises of various origins. Therefore, only a simultaneous detection of a gravitational wave in a number of instruments will allow scientists to claim for a discovery and to gather information about the source of the gravitational wave signal.

The name "Virgo" comes from a cluster of about 1,500 galaxies located in the Virgo constellation, about 50 million light-year away from Earth. As no terrestrial source of gravitational wave is powerful enough to produce a detectable signal, Virgo must observe the Universe. The more powerful the detector, the further it can see gravitational waves, which then increases the number of potential sources. This is relevant as the violent phenomena Virgo is potentially sensitive to (coalescence of a compact binary system, neutron stars or black holes; supernova explosion; etc.) are rare: the more galaxies Virgo is surveying, the larger the probability of a detection.

In the 2000s, the "initial" Virgo detector has been built, commissioned and operated. The instrument reached its goals, in particular its design sensitivity to gravitational wave signals. This long-term endeavour allowed one to validate the technical choices made to build Virgo; it also showed that giant interferometers are promising devices to detect gravitational waves in a wide frequency band[2] · .[3] Yet, the initial Virgo detector was not sensitive enough to achieve such a detection. Therefore, it was decommissioned from 2011 in order to be replaced by the "advanced" Virgo detector which aims at reaching a sensitivity 10 times better, hence surveying a Universe volume 1,000 times larger. The advanced Virgo detector benefits from the experience gained on the initial detector, such as from the technological improvements made over the past years.

The beginning of year 2016 will be an important milestone for the construction of the advanced Virgo detector. Indeed, although the instrument configuration will not be the final one, the detector will be able to take data with a sensitivity improved with respect to the one of the initial Virgo detector. After a few month-long commissioning period, the advanced Virgo detector will join the two advanced LIGO detectors ("aLIGO") for a first common data taking period. The aLIGO detectors are working since the end of Summer 2015.[4]

Goals

File:Virgo aerial view 01.jpg
Aerial view of the site of the Virgo experiment showing the central building, the Mode-Cleaner building, the full 3 km-long west arm long and the beginning of the north arm (on the right). The other buildings include offices, workshops, the local computing center and the interferometer control room. When this picture was shot, the building hosting the project management and the canteen had not been built yet.

The first goal of Virgo is to directly observe gravitational waves, a straightforward prediction of Albert Einstein's general relativity.[5] The study over three decades of the binary pulsar 1913+16, whose discovery was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics, led to indirect evidence of the existence of gravitational waves. The observed evolution over time of this binary pulsar's orbital period is in excellent agreement with the hypothesis that the system is losing energy by emitting gravitational waves.[6] The rotation motion is accelerating (its period, currently 7.75 hours, is decreasing by 76.5 microseconds per year) and the two compact stars get closer by about three meters each year. They should coalesce in about 300 million years. But only the very last moments preceding that particular cosmic collision will generate gravitational waves large enough to be visible in a detector like Virgo. This theoretical scenario for the evolution of Binary Pulsar B1913+16 would be confirmed by a direct detection of gravitational waves from a similar system, the main goal of giant interferometric detectors like Virgo and LIGO.

On the longer term, after accomplishing the primary goal of discovering gravitational waves, Virgo aims at being part of the birth of a new branch of astronomy by observing the Universe with a different and complimentary perspective than current telescopes and detectors. Information brought by gravitational waves will be added to those provided by the study of the electromagnetic spectrum (microwaves, radio waves, infrared, the visible spectrum, ultraviolet, X rays and gamma rays), of cosmic rays and of neutrinos. In order to correlate a gravitational wave detection with visible and localized events in the sky, the LIGO and VIRGO collaborations have signed bilateral agreements with many teams operating telescopes to quickly inform (on the timescale of a few days or a few hours) these partners that a potential gravitational wave signal has been observed. These alerts must be sent before knowing whether the signal is real or not because the source (if it is real) may only remain visible during a short amount of time.

Interferometric detection of a gravitational wave

Effect of a gravitational wave in an optical cavity

In general relativity, a gravitational wave is a space-time perturbation which propagates at the speed of light. It then curves slightly the space-time, which changes locally the light path. Mathematically speaking, if h is the amplitude (assumed to be small) of the incoming gravitational wave and L the length of the optical cavity in which the light is circulation, the change \delta L of the optical path due to the gravitational wave is given by the formula:[7]

\frac{\delta L}{L} = C \times h

with C \le 1 being a geometrical factor which depends on the relative orientation between the cavity and the direction of propagation of the incoming gravitational wave.

Detection principle

File:ITFMichelsonSuspendu.jpg
Basic scheme of a gravitational wave suspended interferometric detector like Virgo.

To start with, Virgo is a Michelson interferometer whose mirrors are suspended. A laser is divided into two beams by a Beam splitter tilted by 45 degrees. The two beams propagate in the two perpendicular arms of the interferometer, are reflected by mirrors located at the end of the arms and recombine on the beam splitter, generating interferences which are detected by a Photodiode. An incoming gravitational wave changes the optical path of the laser beams in the arms, which then changes the interference pattern recorded by the photodiode.

The signal induced by a potential gravitational wave is thus "embedded" in the light intensity variations detected at the interferometer output.[8] Yet, several external causes—globally denoted as noises—changes the interference pattern permanently and significantly. Should nothing be done to remove or mitigate them, the expected physical signals would be buried in noise and would then remain undetectable. The design of detectors like Virgo and LIGO requires thus a detailed inventory of all the noise sources which could impact the measurement, such as a strong and permanent effort to reduce them as much as possible.[9][10] During the data taking periods, dedicated software monitor in real time the noise levels in the interferometer and deep studies are carried out to identify the loudest noises and mitigate them. Each period during which a detector is found to be "too noisy" is excluded from the data analysis: these deadtimes thus need to be reduced as much as possible.

Detector sensitivity

File:BestVirgoSensitivityCurveVSR4.png
A sensitivity curve from the Virgo detector in the frequency band [10 Hz; 10 kHz], computed in August 2011Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.. Its shape is typical: the thermal noise of the mirror suspension pendulum mode dominates at low frequency while the increase at high frequency is due to the laser shot noise. In between these two frequency bands and superimposed to these fundamental noises, one can see resonances (for instance the suspension wire violin modes) such as contributions from various instrumental noises (among which the 50 Hz frequency from the power grid and its harmonics) which one is trying to reduce continuously.

A detector like Virgo is characterized by its sensitivity, a figure of merit providing information about the tiniest signal the instrument could detect—the smaller the value of the sensitivity, the better the detector. The sensitivity varies with frequency as each noise has its own frequency range. For instance, it is foreseen that the sensitivity of the advanced Virgo detector be ultimately limited by:[10]

  • seismic noise (any ground motion whose sources are numerous: waves in the Mediterranean sea, wind, human activity for instance the traffic during daytime, etc.) in the low frequencies up to about 10 Hertz (Hz)
  • the thermal noise of the mirrors and their suspension wires, from a few tens of Hz up to a few hundreds
  • the laser shot noise above a few hundreds of Hz.

Virgo is a wide band detector whose sensitivy ranges from a few Hz up to 10 kHz. Mathematically speaking, its sensitivity is characterized by its power spectrum which is computed in real time using the data recorded by the detector. The curve opposite shows an example of a Virgo amplitude spectrum density (the square root of the power spectrum) from 2011, plotted using log-log scale.

Improving the sensitivity

Using an interferometer rather than a single optical cavity allows one to enhance significantly the sensitivity of the detector to gravitational waves.[11] Indeed, in this configuration based on an interference measurement, the contributions from some experimental noises are strongly reduced: instead of being proportional to the length of the single cavity, they depend in that case on the length difference between the arms (so equal arm length, cancels the noise). In addition, the interferometer configuration benefits from the differential effect induced by a gravitational wave in the plane transverse to its direction of propagation: when the length of an optical path L changes by a quantity \delta L , the perpendicular optical path of same length changes by -\delta L (same magnitude but opposite sign). And the interference at the output port of a Michelson interferometer depends on the difference of length between the two arms: the measured effect is hence amplified by a factor 2 with respect to a simple cavity.

Then, one has to "freeze" the various mirrors of the interferometer: when they move, the optical cavity length changes and so does the interference signal read at the instrument output port. The mirror positions relative to a reference and their alignment are monitored accurately in real time[12] with a precision better than the tenth of a nanometre for the lengths;[10] at the level of a few nanoradians for the angles. The more sensitive the detector, the narrower its optimal working point.

Reaching that working point from an initial configuration in which the various mirrors are moving freely is a control system challenge.[13] In a first step, each mirror is controlled locally to damp its residual motion; then, an automated sequence of steps, usually long and complex, allows one to make the transition between a series of independent local controls to a unique global control steering the interferometer as a whole. Once this working point is reached, it is simpler to keep it as error signals read in real time provide a measurement of the deviation between the actual state of the interferometer and its optimal condition. From the measured differences, mechanical corrections are applied on the various mirrors to bring the system closer to its best working point.

The optimal working point of an interferometric detector of gravitational waves is slightly detuned from the "dark fringe", a configuration in which the two laser beams recombined on the beam splitter interfere in a destructive way: almost no light is detected at the output port. Calculations show that the detector sensitivity scales as[10] \frac{1}{L\times\sqrt{P}}, where L is the arm cavity length and P the laser power on the beam splitter. To improve it, these two quantities must be increased.

  • The arms of the Virgo detector are thus 3-km long.
  • To increase even more (by a factor 50) the length of the laser optical paths, highly reflecting mirrors are installed at the entry of the kilometric arms to create Fabry-Perot cavities.
  • Finally, as the interferometer is tuned on the dark fringe and that the mirrors located at the end of the arms are highly reflecting as well, almost all the laser power is sent back to the laser source from the beam splitter. Therefore, an additional highly reflecting mirror is located in this area to recycle the light and store it inside the instrument.
File:VirgoOpticalScheme.jpg
Optical configuration of the first generation Virgo detector. On the schematics on can read the level of magnitude of the power stored in the various cavities.

History

The Virgo project was approved in 1993 by the French CNRS and in 1994 by the Italian INFN, the two institutes at the origin of the experiment. The construction of the detector has started in 1996 in the Cascina site near Pisa, Italy. In December 2000,[14] CNRS and INFN have created the EGO consortium. EGO is responsible for the Virgo site, in charge of the construction, the maintenance and the operation of the detector, as well as of its upgrades. The goal of EGO is also to promote research and studies about gravitation in Europe.

At the time of December 2015, 19 laboratories plus EGO are members of the Virgo collaboration.

The construction of the initial Virgo detector has been completed in June 2003[15] and several data taking periods have followed between 2007[16] and 2011. Some of these runs were done in coincidence with the two LIGO detectors. Then, a long upgrade phase has started; it should reach an important milestone during 2016. The goal for this second generation detector, called Advanced Virgo, is to reach a sensitivity one order of magnitude better than the initial Virgo detector. This new instrument will then probe a volume of Universe 1,000 times larger, making detections of gravitational waves very likely.

The instrument

File:Virgo3 1.jpg
Schematics of a Virgo mirror suspension called "superattenuator". Its inverted pendulum structure (the pendulum is upside-down with its vertex down, which lowers the resonant frequency of the whole structure) includes a chain of successive filters which damp the seismic noise and followed by the mirror suspension located down of the chain. This last stage allows one to control accurately the position of the mirror for frequencies above 10 mHz.

Seen from the air, the Virgo detector has a characteristic "L" shape with its two 3-km long perpendicular arms. The arm "tunnels" house vacuum pipes of 120 cm of diameter in which the laser beams are travelling under ultra-high vacuum. To increase the interaction between the light and an incoming gravitational wave, a Fabry-Perot optical cavity is installed in each arm as well as a mirror called "recycling mirror" at the instrument entrance, between the laser source and the beam splitter.

Virgo is sensitive to gravitational waves in a wide frequency range, from 10 to 10,000 Hz. The main components of the detector are the following:

  • The laser is the light source of the experiment. It must be powerful, while extremely stable in frequency as well as in amplitude.[17] To meet all these specifications which are somewhat opposing, one starts from a very low power, yet very stable, laser.[18] The light from this laser passes through several amplifiers which enhance its power by a factor 100. A 50 W output power was achieved for the last configuration of the initial Virgo detector—called "Virgo+"—while in the final configuration of Advanced Virgo, the laser will deliver 200 W.[19] The retained solution is to have a fully fibered laser with an amplification stage made of fibers as well, to improve the robustness of the system. That laser is actively stabilised in amplitude, frequency and position, in order to not inject additional noise in the interferometer, and hence to improve the sensitivity to the gravitational wave signal.
  • The large mirrors of the arm cavities are the most critical optics of the interferometer. Those mirrors make a resonant optical cavity in each arm and allow one to increase the power of the light stored in the 3-km arms. Thank to this setup, the interaction time between the light and the gravitational wave signal is significantly increased. Those mirrors are non-standard pieces, made from state-of-the-art technologies. They are cylinders of 35 cm of diameter and 20 cm thickness,[19] made from the purest glass in the world.[20] The mirrors are polished to the atomic level in order to not diffuse (and hence loose) some light.[21] Finally, a reflecting coating (a Bragg reflector made with Ion Beam Sputtering, or IBS) is added. The mirrors located at the end of the arms reflect all the incoming light: less than 0.002% of the light is lost at each reflection.[22]
  • In order to mitigate the seismic noise which could propagate up to the mirrors, shake them and hence hide any potential gravitational wave signal, the large mirrors are suspended by a complex system. All of the main mirrors are suspended by four thin fibers made of silica[23] (hence in glass) which are attached to a series of attenuators. This chain of suspension, called 'superattenuator', is close to 10 meters high and is also under vacuum.[24] The supperattenuators do not only limit the disturbances on the mirrors; they also allow one to steer precisely the mirror positions and orientations. The optical table where the injection optics used to shape the laser beam are located, such as the benches used for the light detection, are also suspended and under vacuum, in order to limit the seismic and acoustic noises. For advanced Virgo, the whole instrumentation used to detect gravitational waves signals and to steer the interferometer (photodiodes, cameras and the associated electronics) is also installed on several suspended benches, and under vacuum. This choice and the use of light traps (called baffles) inside the vacuum pipes, prevent the residual seismic noise from being reintroduced into the dark port signals because of spurious reflections from diffused light.
  • Virgo is the largest ultra-high vacuum installation in Europe, with a total volume of 6,800 cubic meters.[25] The two 3-km arms are made of a long pipe of 1.2m of diameter in which the residual pressure is about 1 thousandth of a billionth of an atmosphere. Thus, the residual air molecules are not disturbing the path of the laser beams. Large gate valves are located at both ends of the arms so that work can be done in the mirror vacuum towers without breaking the arm ultra-high vacuum. Indeed, both Virgo arms have been kept under vacuum since 2008.[26]

The initial Virgo detector

The initial Virgo detector[27] has recorded scientific data from 2007 and 2011 during four science runs. There was a few month-long shut-down in 2010 to allow for a major upgrade of the Virgo suspension system: the original suspension steel wires were replaced by glass fibers in order to reduce the thermal noise.[28] After several months of data taking with this final configuration, the initial Virgo detector was shut down in September 2011[29] to begin the installation of Advanced Virgo.

The advanced Virgo detector

Advanced Virgo[30] aims at being 10 times more sensitive than initial Virgo. Such a sensitivity should allow for the first detection of gravitational waves in the coming years. Advanced Virgo keeps the same vacuum infrastructure as Virgo (with four additional cryotraps located at both ends of the two kilometric arms to trap residual particles coming from the mirror towers) but the remain of the interferometer has been significantly upgraded. The new mirrors are larger (350 mm of diameter, for a weight of 40 kg) and their optical performances have been improved.[19] The critical optical elements used to control the interferometer are now under vacuum on suspended benches. A system of adaptive optics will also be installed to correct in-situ the mirror aberrations.[19] In the final Advanced Virgo configuration, the laser power will be 200 W.

A first milestone for Advanced Virgo should be reached in 2016: the installation of the new detector will be completed, which will allow the instrument to start taking data with a better sensibility than the initial Virgo detector. A first joint science run with LIGO in the second half of 2016 will start after a commissioning period of a few months. The final sensitivity of Advanced Virgo should be achieved in 2018.

Gallery

  • Virgo Cascina panorama.jpg

    Overview of the Virgo site.

  • VirgoDetectorAerialView.jpg

    Aerial view of the Virgo detector.

  • IGP9211.JPG

    Start of the Virgo north arm; in the foreground on the right, the central building.

  • IGP9215.JPG

    View of the 3 km-long Virgo north arm.

  • IGP9210.JPG

    The Virgo site with, in the foreground, the building which hosts the detector control room and the local computer center.

  • Virgo Cascina Central building.jpg

    The Virgo central building which hosts the laser and the beamsplitter mirror.

  • IGP9212.JPG

    View of the 3 km-long Virgo west arm (right pipe). The tube on the left, which is 150 m-long, hosts the mode-cleaner cavity which is used to filter spatially the laser beam.

References

  1. ↑ Memorandum of Understanding Between VIRGO and LIGO
  2. ↑ Gravitational Waves: Sources, Detectors and Searches
  3. ↑ Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves
  4. ↑ Advanced LIGO to Begin Operations
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ P. Hello. Détection des ondes gravitationnelles. École thématique. Ecole Joliot Curie "Structure nucléaire : un nouvel horizon", Maubuisson, (France), du 8-13 septembre 1997 : 16ème session, 1997. http://memsic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/cel-00652732/document
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Le CNRS signe l'accord franco-italien de création du consortium EGO "European Gravitational Observatory"
  15. ↑ Ondes gravitationnelles Inauguration du détecteur franco-italien VIRGO
  16. ↑ Ondes gravitationnelles : Virgo entre dans sa phase d'exploitation scientifique
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 19.3 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Private communication from Carlo Bradaschia, Virgo vacuum group leader (2015).
  27. ↑ Virgo: a laser interferometer to detect gravitational waves
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector

External links

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