An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics
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A space project, initially → LISA, consisting of a configuration of three satellites, aimed to detect low frequency → gravitational waves that cannot be measured by ground-based detectors. The detection range will be from about 0.1 milliHz to 1 Hz. One "mother" and two "daughter" spacecrafts will be brought into an orbit around the Sun, which is similar to the Earth's orbit. The satellites will fly in a near-equilateral triangle formation, with a constant distance of one million km between, following the Earth along its orbit at a distance of around 50 million km. The mother spacecrafts carries two and each of the daughter spacecraft carry one free-flying → test masses that will be kept as far as possible free of external disturbances. The mutual distances of the test masses from satellite to satellite will be measured by means of high-precision, → Michelson-like laser → interferometry. In this way, the extremely small distance variations between the test masses of two satellites can be detected which are caused by the passages of a gravitational waves. The required measurement accuracy of the distances amounts to typically 1/100 of the diameter of a hydrogen atom (10^-12 m) at a distance of two million km.

→ evolve; → laser; → interferometer; → space; → antenna.

A kind of laser where the lasing medium is a gas or a mixture of gases that can be excited with an electric discharge. The first gas laser to operate successfully was built by A. Javan and William R. Bennette at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. This laser used a mixture of helium and neon as the active medium and produced a continuous beam rather than a series of pulses. This laser operated in the infrared region of the spectrum at 1.15 micrometres. A few years later Kumar Patel developed the CO₂ laser.

→ gas; → laser.

A laser beam with the output power in the range 10¹²-10¹⁵ watts/cm², capable of depositing kilo-joule order energies during nano-second time intervals in small volumes (about 1 mm³). High power lasers, which can produce temperatures of 10-50 million degrees and pressures of 10-100 million bars, are used to simulate astrophysical conditions in laboratories.

→ high; → power;, → laser.

leyzer, → laser; por "much, many, full," → full; tavân, → power.

1) A device that generates an intense directional beam of → monochromatic and → coherent light by exciting atoms to a higher energy level and causing them to radiate their energy in phase. The high degree of collimation arises from the fact that excited atoms are are situated in a cavity bounded by two parallel front and back mirrors. A first photon stimulates an atom which emits a second photon, and so on thanks to the mirrors. The resulting photons are all identical. They have the same energy which gives them the same color and a unique direction. The first working laser, a pulsed ruby device, was developed by T. Maiman in 1959. See also → gas laser, → stimulated emission; → maser.
2) The light produced in this way.

Acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, on pattern of → maser.

A technique that uses a suitable arrangement of → laser beams and magnetic fields to capture → cesium (¹³³Cs) atoms from a thermal vapor and slow the motion of the atoms, cooling them to just a few micro-kelvins above the → absolute zero. The technique allows trapping some 10⁷ cesium atoms in a cloud a few millimeters in diameter in a few tenths of a second. At a temperature of 2 μK, the average thermal velocity of the cesium atoms is of the order of 1 cm s^-1, so they stay together for a relatively long time. The laser cooling technique is the key tool which enabled the operation of an → atomic fountain clock.

→ laser; → cooling; → technique.

An optical instrument using laser → beams to form → interference pattern. There are two types of laser interferometers: → homodyne and → heterodyne. A homodyne interferometer, like → Michelson interferometer, uses a single-frequency laser source. A → heterodyne interferometer uses a laser source with two close frequencies.

→ laser; → interferometer.

A facility dedicated to the detection and measurement of cosmic → gravitational waves. It consists of two widely separated installations, or detectors, within the United States, operated in unison as a single observatory. One installation is located in Hanford (Washington) and the other in Livingston (Louisiana), 3,000 km apart. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), LIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and by industrial contractors. Construction of the facilities was completed in 1999. Initial operation of the detectors began in 2001. Each LIGO detector beams laser light down arms 4 km long, which are arranged in the shape of an "L." If a gravitational wave passes through the detector system, the distance traveled by the laser beam changes by a minuscule amount -- less than one-thousandth of the size of an atomic nucleus (10^-18 m). Still, LIGO should be able to pick this difference up. LIGO directly detected gravitational waves for the first time from a binary → black hole merger (GW150914) on September 14, 2015 (Abbott et al., 2016, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061102). The Nobel Prize in physics 2017 was awarded to three physicists (Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne) for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. LIGO had a prominent role in the detection of → GW170817, the first event with an → electromagnetic counterpart.

→ laser; → interferometer; → gravitational; → wave; → observatory.

A collaborative project between → NASA and → ESA to develop and operate a space-based gravitational wave detector sensitive at frequencies between 0.03 mHz and 0.1 Hz. LISA detects gravitational-wave induced strains in → space-time by measuring changes of the separation between fiducial masses in three spacecraft 5 million km apart. Ultimately, NASA and ESA decided in 2011 not to proceed with the mission. LISA was not the highest ranked mission in the 2010 Decadal Survey and funding constraints prevented NASA from proceeding with multiple large missions (http://lisa.nasa.gov). → LISA pathfinder.

→ laser; → interferometer; → space; → antenna.

A laser that emits short pulses of coherent light in fixed intervals, rather than a continuous flow of photons. → laser; → high power laser.

Pulsed adj. of → pulse; → laser.