IMAGINE bizarre shapes—giant loops, spirals and balls of wool—made of delicate materials, all spinning sedately in space. Not an interplanetary sculpture park, but an array of detectors that could one day net one of the greatest prizes in physics: gravity waves. "We are seriously suggesting using such structures to detect cosmic gravitational waves," says Robin Tucker of the University of Lancaster.
Gravity waves are ripples produced in the fabric of space-time by a massive body, such as a black hole, undergoing violent acceleration. As gravity waves pass by, they alternately stretch and squeeze space, so one way to detect them would be to put a solid body in their way and look for any periodic shrinkage or expansion. "Our idea is to use 'slender bodies'—that is, ones that have a small cross-section compared with their length," says Tucker.
The theory of how slender bodies vibrate was developed by the Cosserat ...
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