The Next Big Deal: Detecting Gravitational Waves at Your Desk

Physics is on the front pages of newspapers around the world. This time it is because of the announcement made by a team of scientists who seem to have found indirect evidence for the existence of “primordial gravitational waves”.

However, a bigger breakthrough would be direct detection of gravitational waves. Many scientists are working on achieving this, but all of those efforts involve large and expensive experiments. New developments show that it may be possible to do so in a device not bigger than a box on a desk.