Cabinet approves LIGO-India, gravitational-wave detector to be built in Maha

The Union Cabinet has approved LIGO-India, a project to build a state-of-the-art gravitational-wave detector in Hingoli, Maharashtra, that will work in tandem with the two LIGO detectors in the U.S. and improve the quality of observations.

The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved a project to build an advanced gravitational-wave detector in Maharashtra at an estimated cost of Rs 2,600 crore. The facility’s construction is expected to be completed by 2030.

By building it, “Indian S&T will leap-frog in a number of cutting-edge frontiers of great national relevance, in particular quantum-sensing and metrology,” Tarun Souradeep, director of the Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, and spokesperson (science) of LIGO-India, told The Hindu.

According to Union minister Jitendra Singh, it will come up in Hingoli district, where land has been acquired to the tune of 174 acres.

The observatory will be the third of its kind, made to the exact specifications of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (LIGO), in Louisiana and Washington in the U.S. LIGO-India will work in tandem with them.

The project is a collaboration between a consortium of Indian research institutions and the U.S. observatories, plus several international partners.

The Indian government had approved the project in principle in February 2016. The project proponents have since selected a site for the detector, which needs to be flat and free of seismic disturbances; characterising it; and planning the observatory.

The LIGO is a giant L-shaped instrument. Each arm of the ‘L’ is 4 km long. Two laser pulses are shot through each arm at the same time, and they bounce off a mirror at the end to return to the vertex. A detector checks whether the pulses return at the same time.