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Japan’s pioneering detector set to join hunt for gravitational waves

LIGO’s Asian cousin will this year deploy ambitious technology to improve sensitivity in the search for these faint, cosmic ripples — but its biggest enemy could be snowmelt.
  1. Davide Castelvecchi
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The KAGRA telescope system

The KAGRA detector is located under Mount Ikenoyama, near the northern cost of Japan’s Honshu island. Credit: The Asahi Shimbun via Getty

Inside a house-sized scaffolding wrapped in thick plastic sheets, Takayuki Tomaru is in full clean-room attire. The physicist is performing one of the most delicate and crucial tasks in the construction of a gravitational-wave observatory: installing one of the machine’s four mirrors, each a 23-kilogram cylinder of solid sapphire known as a test mass. When operations begin later this year, their job will be to bounce infrared-laser beams back and forth along two 3-kilometre high-vacuum pipes, ready to sense the passage of gravitational waves.

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Nature 565, 9-10 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07867-z

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