Scientist wins prestigious award for gravitational wave detection

A scientist involved in creating the ultra-sensitive detectors needed to glimpse gravitational waves for the very first time has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize. Dr Katherine Dooley, from Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy, has picked up the £100,000 prize for scientific work 'that has had a significant international impact'. Dr Dooley is an experimental physicist who specialises in developing the equipment needed to reach out far into the Universe and detect gravitational waves. Gravitational waves, first predicted by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago, are tiny ripples in space-time that are emitted as a result of extreme cosmic events, such as the colliding of two black holes. Having spent 4 years in residence at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US, Dr Dooley put some of the key processes in place that made it possible to detect gravitational waves for the very first time in 2015 after decades of searching. The discovery was made using two detectors in the US, made up of 4km-long L-shaped experiments that bounce lasers back-and-forth off a collection of mirrors and become fractionally distorted in the presence of a gravitational wave. Dr Dooley's work was primarily focussed on increasing the laser power so that researchers could look deeper into the Universe and thus have a better chance of making more detections.