Two professors of physics at Syracuse University have brought laurels to the school by winning the prestigious National Science Foundation award.
The $2.1 million award to Stefan Ballmer, an associate professor, and Charles Brightman, an endowed professor, will be used to research and develop global gravitational wave detectors of the third generation, which will lead to an expansion in capacity of scientists to monitor cosmic activity in the outer edge of the universe.
The project, titled “Collaborative Research: The Next Generation of Gravitational Wave Detectors,” is a collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, California State University Fullerton, California Institute of Technology and Syracuse University.
“Every year in the universe, hundreds of thousands of black holes collide,” Ballmer said.
“That’s one collision every five minutes. Three years ago we observed our very first black-hole collision. This award will help us design a detector that will observe all of the collisions happening in the universe. This is the first step toward building observatories that can map the dark side of the universe and understand the structure that we see today,” he added.
The project will also benefit the students and postdoctoral candidates of the participating universities.
Both professors were earlier part of an international team of scientists that confirmed Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory in 2015 with the first observation of gravitational waves.