{"id":4164,"date":"2017-11-29T13:36:56","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T19:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/for-wisconsin\/?post_type=campus_story&#038;p=4164"},"modified":"2017-11-29T13:37:25","modified_gmt":"2017-11-29T19:37:25","slug":"uw-milwaukee-scientists-played-key-roles-in-ligo-nobel-prize-victory","status":"publish","type":"campus_story","link":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/story\/uw-milwaukee-scientists-played-key-roles-in-ligo-nobel-prize-victory\/","title":{"rendered":"UW-Milwaukee scientists played key roles in LIGO Nobel Prize victory"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-thumbnail\">\n<div>\n<figure id=\"attachment_4166\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4166\" style=\"width: 1000px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/for-wisconsin\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/378\/2017\/11\/MIL_Astrophysics_20160128_PA_IMC_580_1000px.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-4166 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/for-wisconsin\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/378\/2017\/11\/MIL_Astrophysics_20160128_PA_IMC_580_1000px.jpg\" alt=\"Photo of Patrick Brady, Jolien Creighton, Alan Wiseman, and Xavier Siemens, who lead UWM's LIGO team. (UWM Photo)\" width=\"1000\" height=\"666\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-4166\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">(from left) Patrick Brady, Jolien Creighton, Alan Wiseman, and Xavier Siemens lead UWM&#8217;s LIGO team. (UWM Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<div>The names of UW-Milwaukee (UWM) scientists don\u2019t appear in the announcement of the\u00a0<a style=\"background-color: #ffffff\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/physics\/laureates\/2017\/press.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2017 Nobel Prize winners in physics<\/a>, but they played major roles in the\u00a0<span class=\"e2ma-style\">achievement for which the prize was given \u2013 the discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">UWM\u2019s Leonard E. Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics is the home to the team responsible for teasing the signal of discovery from exquisitely fine details in a sea of data from the LIGO detectors in Washington and Louisiana.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">UWM\u2019s team, led by Patrick Brady, Jolien Creighton, Xavier Siemens and Alan Wiseman, played key roles in determining:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span class=\"e2ma-style\">what to look for in the data,<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"e2ma-style\">how to look for it,<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"e2ma-style\">processing the data and signaling a detection,<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"e2ma-style\">and confirming the discovery.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The four leaders of the team are former post-doctoral researchers of California Institute of Technology physicist Kip Thorne, who shares the prize with Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Barry C. Barish, also of CalTech.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">On Sept. 14, 2015, LIGO instruments detected infinitesimal ripples in space-time create billions of years ago by the collision of two massive black holes. The detection validated decades of painstaking work to build and refine LIGO, and confirmed a century-old prediction by Albert Einstein.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">The dramatic find also promised to revolutionize how we explore the cosmos, and indeed discoveries are continuing apace \u2013 with another major announcement expected later this month.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">The UWM team\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/uwm.edu\/news\/uwms-big-data-helps-find-gravitational-waves\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">developed the analytical framework and the computational tools<\/a>\u00a0to make LIGO\u2019s discoveries possible.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">\u201cThe UWM group has been a key part of the project from very early on,\u201d said Clifford Will, a distinguished professor of physics at Florida State University who is known for his contributions to the Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity. \u201cThey were involved both in building the infrastructure and in resolving issues related to using the data. They were responsible for important calculations that were used to make the detection. Some of those formulas were built into the data-analysis protocol for LIGO.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">Brady, professor of physics and director of the Parker Center, explains UWM\u2019s role this way: \u201cYou might say that, if the detectors are LIGO\u2019s eyes, we played key roles in developing the brains and the mind that perceived and understood what the eyes detected,\u201d Brady said.<\/span><\/p>\n<div id=\"video_post-28909\" class=\"inline-media-post alignleft\">\n<div class=\"image icon-overlay\">\n<p>[youtube https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=xJA98BNm2mg&amp;w=560&amp;h=315]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"title\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Brady tipped his cap to the Nobel winners.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re thrilled that Rai, Kip and Barry have been recognized with the Nobel Prize for their work on gravitational waves,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve learned so much from each of them over the years and are glad they created the opportunity for us to be part of this momentous discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">Perceiving a signal requires an immense amount of computing to process the data. UWM played a key role in designing and building a cluster of computers to create a dedicated supercomputer.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">\u201cConstruction of the cluster at UWM began about the same time as the LIGO Scientific Collaboration formed in 1997,\u201d said Wiseman, associate professor of physics at UWM. Wiseman and Bruce Allen, who is now director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, were the main architects of UWM\u2019s computer hardware.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">Today, the UWM cluster is one of several that comprise the LIGO Data Grid, the network of supercomputers needed to scour the voluminous data accumulated in the search.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">But computers are only as smart as their programming. The UWM physicists and their collaborators \u2013 many of them former students \u2013 developed and implemented the analytical tools needed to detect the signature of gravitational waves in the steady stream of signals from LIGO\u2019s detectors.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">\u201cEarly on, we were inventing the methods to search that much data and inventing the computing methodologies to analyze it,\u201d Brady said. \u201cIt hadn\u2019t been done before.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">Another important role of the UWM team was to massage LIGO\u2019s data into a form that can be analyzed, a process called calibration, the first part of the data handling system created at UWM.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">\u201cThe [detector] delivers an electric signal that\u2019s\u00a0related\u00a0to a gravitational wave signal, but you need to calibrate the data to see it,\u201d said Siemens, an associate professor of physics at UWM who co-chaired the LIGO Scientific Collaboration\u2019s Calibration Team.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">UWM\u2019s computing system also serves as the alarm system that notifies project members when the instruments have detected a signal worthy of closer examination.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">By Sept. 14, 2015, the team\u2019s work had been refined and practically perfected. Shortly after Advanced LIGO began taking data, the system sounded an alarm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">\u201cWe knew within three minutes that the detectors had seen something,\u201d said UWM postdoctoral researcher Sarah Caudill, who ran the analysis that confirmed the signal came from two black holes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">\u201cSomeone made a time-frequency spectrogram and when I first saw those plots, my heart skipped a beat. We are all trained to look for the chirp-like signature of a real gravitational wave in the spectrograms. And these showed a beautiful textbook example of a chirp signal.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"e2ma-style\">The first detection of a gravitational wave had been made.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The names of UW-Milwaukee (UWM) scientists don\u2019t appear in the announcement of the\u00a02017 Nobel Prize winners in physics, but they played major roles in the\u00a0achievement for which the prize was given \u2013 the discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). UWM\u2019s Leonard E. Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":4166,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","institution":[107],"story_category":[],"class_list":["post-4164","campus_story","type-campus_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","institution-uw-milwaukee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campus_story\/4164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campus_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/campus_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4164"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"institution","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/institution?post=4164"},{"taxonomy":"story_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/story_category?post=4164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}