Last Updated:
29 July 2011

Site Feedback:
Sheon Chua

The Facility

Located at the western end of the ANU Physics Department (Building 38b) the facility includes a laboratory, clean-down room, plant room, control room, office space and seminar facilities. The lab boasts a 12mx12m clean room with an isolated concrete slab and a 2 tonne gantry crane for the installation of UWA designed suspension and vacuum systems. A filtered air conditioning system maintains the temperature to within 1 degree over a twenty four hour period. A photo of the facility is shown below.

The Gravitational Wave Building

The expected strain amplitudes from continuous (persistent, quasi-monochromatic) gravitational wave sources such as rotating non-axisymmetric neutron stars is exceedingly small: ~10^-24 at most. Fortunately, because of the persistence of the expected signal, it is possible to improve the signal to noise ratio by averaging over a long time period.

However, this averaging process require a lot of computational resources. So, for continuous gravitational wave searches, we use the supercomputing facilities at the Australian National Computational Infrastructure, Caltech (USA) and the Albert Einstein Institute (Germany) to store and process the large data sets involved in these searches.