Narrow Results

This chapter describes how Advanced LIGO came to be, as a case study for planning and managing large-scale scientific infrastructure projects. A short history is given along with motivations for the scope, timing and project structure. The key documents, tools and organizational bodies that enabled the project to be executed successfully are described. Several specific systems aspects — contamination, testing, configuration and quality control, and fault recording — are mentioned. Lastly, the project management approach is reviewed.

The past decade has witnessed the successful operation of the first generation of large scale ground-based gravitational-wave interferometers — LIGO, Virgo, and GEO600 — each demonstrating remarkably sensitive, robust performance over a series of observing runs beginning in 2002 and continuing through 2011. Although gravitational waves have not yet been directly detected, searches by these detectors have established noteworthy limits on the possible emission of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources. Second generation instruments currently under construction such as Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and KAGRA will begin observing in the second half of this decade with sensitivities that are predicted to lead to direct detections of binary neutron star mergers and possibly other sources of gravitational waves.