Outreach

LIGO in your hands designed and built by Dr. Borja Sorazu.

“LIGO in your hands, the link between gravitational wave detectors and the Raspberry Pi”

‘LIGO in your hands’ is a highly portable and interactive Michelson interferometer of low power consumption, that is ideal for demonstrating the essential parts of a gravitational wave detector and it can be used as a tool for teaching interferometry and interference, feedback and control, or even as a demonstration tool for precision measurement.

The user interaction is facilitated by a touch screen and an exclusively designed GUI that also provides HD video playback capabilities which can be displayed on the integrated touchscreen or any projection device (through the HDMI output provided on the control box). A camera and a photodiode are used to monitor the interference pattern and provide input signals to a microcomputer (a single Raspberry Pi) that actively controls the interferometer, being able to stabilize it and lock it to any point of its interference pattern.

The device can record perturbation from external disturbances. For example, if that disturbance is a sound wave, then the device becomes a microphone, being able to play back the sound recorded through the light. The GUI provides optical alignment functionalities and post-processing of the recorded data without the need of any additional equipment.

LIGO in your hands is powered by a single standard power supply 5V, 2.5A and therefore it can run on a conventional power bank for hours. The optical layout is robust and does not typically need realignment.

Four interferometers were funded and acquired thanks to the Newton-Bhabha fund and were later shipped to India.