The A+ upgrade: Expanding the Advanced LIGO Horizon

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The consortium involved in this capital proposal has a strong and extensive track record in working with industry, in public outreach and schoolteacher CPD, which will continue throughout and beyond the construction period. Beneficiaries will include the optics industry e.g. companies such as Gooch and Housego - enhancing capability in the area of manufacture of optical components, and such as Helia Photonics via development of low loss optical coatings. Beneficiaries will also include those working in the sectors of energy and security via the application of MEMS gravimeters. The consortium has transferred technical knowledge and will further do so to help company competitiveness and success, all feeding back into the UK economy. The UK economy will further benefit through the spinning off of new companies arising from the research or licensing out of the technology being developed.

We anticipate research developments, spinning off from the gravitational wave work to contribute to the grand challenge areas of health and wellbeing via developments of software algorithms which can help with removal of artifacts in scanning medical imaging devices and in the development of hardware which can lead to the differentiation of a variety of stem cells with major implications for medicine. More globally, as a spin-off from the gravitational waves work at Cardiff a Data Innovation Institute has been established to conduct fundamental research into the aspects of managing, analysing and interpreting massive volumes of textual and numerical information. This will benefit projects in a wide-ranging spectrum of disciplines including social, biological, life and engineering sciences, e.g. in the biological and life sciences by extracting information from data sets without compromising privacy and confidentiality, and interpreting large data sets into reliable and understandable mathematical models.

Public outreach involving television, radio, science festivals, masterclasses and public lectures feature strongly in our present and proposed programmes and the legacy of the effort we have devoted to celebrate the international year of light - such as the development of a laser harp - fit well with the wider public outreach work we undertake in collaboration with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration on the physics of neutron stars, black holes and the Universe as a whole. Working with the Scottish government and Education Scotland members of the consortium will build on previous work contributing strongly to the curriculum for physics in Scotland by extending provision of CPD for schoolteachers in Scotland, producing videos and other material helping them to tackle the challenges introduced by the more interdisciplinary nature of the new school qualifications, and this support is very transportable to be used throughout the UK. The wide range of impact provided by the scale of our programme is excellent for the training of early career researchers and graduate students and we aim to ensure that all our young scientists have experience in these areas, enabling them to have access to a wide range of career opportunities.