This collaborative award to the California Institute of Technology and to Southern University Baton Rouge. It enables the development of a Visitor Center at the Livingston, LA site of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The Center will contain hands-on exhibits depicting aspects of physical science underlying the functioning of LIGO, its target sources of gravitational waves, and the analysis and interpretation of its data. The exhibits will be provided in collaboration with the Exploratorium of San Francisco. The Center and its exhibits will then provide the focus for revamped pre-service and in-service science teacher training at Southern University Baton Rouge (SUBR). The Louisiana Board of Regents, through existing programs LaSIP and LA GEARUP, will coordinate transportation of teachers and students to the Center and to SUBR to maximize the exposure of Center-related activities to underserved groups. In addition, SUBR physics and education students and postdocs will be trained to serve as docents at the Center.
LIGO's goal is the direct detection of gravitational waves and the initiation of gravitational wave astronomy. LIGO is operated by Caltech (with subcontract to MIT) through a cooperative agreement with NSF. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration comprises approximately 450 scientists in over 40 institutions in 8 countries. LIGO is already operating and taking data while continuing to refine its instrumentation to reach its design sensitivity. The LIGO instruments work by measuring exquisitely tiny changes in the distances between the mirrors of the instruments' interferometers caused by the passage of gravitational waves. LIGO can already measure changes smaller than one one-hundredth the diameter of the atomic nucleus---within a factor of ten of the design goal. Gravitational waves are expected to be produced by the universe's most violent events including the formation and mergers of black holes and neutron stars, supernovae, and the Big Bang itself. LIGO's science, involving many of those aspects of physics already known to the general public---Einstein, black holes, exploding stars, the big bang---has already captured the public's interest. Leveraging LIGO science and SUBR's science education programs to motivate teaching and learning of physical science, especially in an underserved area like Louisana, could provide an important model for the outreach and educational activities of similar large projects.
This award is co-funded by the Physics Division and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate.
