Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier - Bat. 3R4 - 118 route de Narbonne - 31062 Toulouse Cedex 09 - France


Accueil > Événements > Séminaires 2016

The MIGA experiment : towards sub Hz Gravitational Wave detectors using Atom Interferometry

Benjamin Canuel

22 janvier 2016 à 11 heures

In the last decades, several ground-­‐based Gravitational Wave (GW)
detectors based on optical interferometry were built and operated. Under few tens of Hz, such experiments are limited by several sources of cavity length noise that mimic the effect of gravitational waves
(Newtonian Noise, seismic noise, radiation pressure noise...). We are
building a new, hybrid detector called MIGA (Matter-­‐wave laser
Interferometer Gravitation Antenna) that couples atomic and optical
interferometry to study the strain tensor of space-­‐time and gravitation at lower frequencies. The MIGA interrogation scheme will allow to read GW signals free of cavity length noise which opens new perspective for ground based GW detection. This underground infrastructure will be embedded into the French LSBB low noise laboratory in Rustrel and will consist in a set of atomic interferometers simultaneously manipulated by the resonant optical field of a 200m cavity. The new experimental concept of MIGA will allow applications in fundamental physics but also in geoscience. In this talk, I will present the experimental concept and MIGA and put it in perspective with respect to purely optical GW detectors.