Indo-Australian gravity tie-up at risk over funding hunt

London, Mar. 16 (ANI): Time is running out for an Indo-Australian plan to join the US Laser Inferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) network.

The detector, to be installed at Gingin in Western Australia, is scheduled to begin collecting data in 2017 - but only if the two countries can commit the required funding by October 2011.

Predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 as part of his theory of general relativity, gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space and time caused by objects moving with accelerated, non-symmetrical motion.

The waves promise to open a new branch of astronomy. So far, they have escaped direct detection.

The existing LIGO detectors - two in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana - have been searching for the waves without success since 2002, in partnership with the GEO600 detector in Hanover, Germany, and the Virgo detector in Cascina, Italy.

Hope is now pinned on 'Advanced LIGO' and 'Advanced Virgo' projects to upgrade the existing detectors and make them ten times more sensitive.

Stanley Whitcomb, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and chief scientist of LIGO, says that locating one of the advanced LIGO detectors in Australia, far from the existing observatories, will improve physicists' ability to pinpoint gravitational waves.

The Australian Consortium would operate the Australian detector for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy (ACIGA), a group of five universities in the country.

But there is a catch: ACIGA must find around Australian dollars 140 million to build a facility to house the detector, plus another Australian dollars 60 million to meet running costs.

The deadline pressure and the amount of money needed have forced ACIGA to look for international partners.

The Indian Initiative in Gravitational-wave Observations (IndIGO) - a group of seven national institutions - answered the call, offering to seek Australian dollars 30 million from the its government to pay 15 percent of the costs over the period 2011-22.

The project "presents Indian science with an historic opportunity", says Bala Iyer, a theoretical physicist at the Raman Research Institute (RRI) in Bangalore and chairman of IndIGO.

Iyer and his group at the RRI have worked in theoretical gravitational-wave research for more than 20 years, collaborating with Sanjeev Dhurandhar, a data analyst and modeller at the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune.

Iyer says that LIGO promises to extend this alliance to experimental work, with participation from other members of the consortium, including C. S. Unnikrishnan, a high energy physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, and colleagues at the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology in Indore.

IndIGO also sees the partnership as a short cut to its goal of building an Indian gravitational-wave detector by 2020. (ANI)