Link to the demonstrator: in English
Metadata:
Age: 16-18
Duration: 4 hours
Equipment: PC with internet connection
Contact details
Author: Emmanuel Chaniotakis (EA)
Contact: info[at]frontiers-project[dot]eu
Overview
The discovery of Gravitational Waves provided humankind with a new window to the universe, allowing us to probe extreme cosmic phenomena and testing nature at its limits. This scenario provides a step by step introduction to gravitational waves and their detection, introduces the concept of detector sensitivity and through a game-based approach, introduces students to the different noise parameters that affect detector performance.
Learning outcomes:
- To help students understand the meaning of noise.
- To guide students to identify sources of noise for gravitational wave detectors.
- To help students correlate the reach of a detector with its noise level.
- To show how to compromise budget with performance.
- To present how to estimate the most important sources of noise and make data driven decisions.
Prior knowledge:
- Newton’s law of gravitation
- Waves: Definition and properties
- Wave interference
- Signal and noise
- Orders of magnitude
Concepts introduced:
- Gravitational wave
- Interferometer
- Sources of noise
- sensitivity
- reach
Learning intentions:
By the end of this descriptor, students should be able to:
- describe roughly what gravitational waves are.
- explain that detector noise deters us from exploring farther regions in the universe using gravitational waves as messengers.
- compare the significance of different sources of noise in a gravitational wave detector.
- explain that even though the effects of gravitational waves on earth are minuscule, these derive from very high energy processes.
Key activities:
- Building a virtual gravitational wave detector
- Identifying sources of noise and taking corrective actions to reduce it
- Searching for glitches in a gravitational wave detector