The Matter-Wave laser Interferometer Gravitation Antenna, MIGA, will be a hybrid instrument composed of a network of atom interferometers horizontally aligned and interrogated by the resonant field of an optical cavity. This detector will provide measurements of sub Hertz variations of the gravitational strain tensor. MIGA will bring new methods for geophysics for the characterization of spatial and temporal variations of the local gravity field and will also be a demonstrator for future low frequency Gravitational Wave (GW) detections. MIGA will enable a better understanding of the coupling at low frequency between these different signals. The detector will be installed underground in Rustrel (FR), at the “Laboratoire Souterrain Bas Bruit” (LSBB), a facility with exceptionally low environmental noise and located far away from major sources of anthropogenic disturbances. We give in this paper an overview of the operating mode and status of the instrument before detailing simulations of the gravitational background noise at the MIGA installation site.

Date Published: 29 April 2016
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 9900, Quantum Optics, 990008 (29 April 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2228825

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9900:
Quantum Optics
Jürgen Stuhler; Andrew J. Shields, Editor(s)