A Cardiff University undergraduate has collaborated with academics from the US on a project to improve gravitational waves detectors at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) as part of a summer research placement.
Emily Joy Jones, Em.J, who is in the final year of her Astrophysics (MPhys) degree at Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy, conducted research over a period of 10 weeks at Louisiana State University (LSU) in the US.
Working with the LIGO detector characterization team, Em.J helped locate koi fish glitch sources - a specific type of glitch, classified according to their morphology by a machine learning algorithm called Gravity Spy.
Em.J said: "This was a really exciting project that has taught me so many new physics skills.
"For example, I ran a tool called Hierarchical Veto on data from LIGO's third observing run to try to locate which of the hundreds of auxiliary channels at LIGO Livingston were related to the glitches.
"I also produced Omega scans containing time series plots and spectrograms of the loudest glitches from each analysis to get a better understanding of the nature of these glitches."
