INTERVIEW German gravitational wave physicist Maria Haney of Nikhef has been appointed professor by special appointment at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at VU University Amsterdam.
Haney has been awarded the special chair in “Observational Science with Gravitational Waves” by the Society for the Promotion of Natural Sciences, Medicine and Surgery (GNGH). This was announced by the university.
Haney specialises in modelling waveforms that large gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA and the future Einstein Telescope might detect. She describes it herself as “an applied form of general relativity”.
Haney grew up and studied physics in Jena in eastern Germany, obtained her PhD in Rome and subsequently undertook post-doctoral research in India and Switzerland. Since 2022, she has been a staff member at Nikhef in Amsterdam, working for the Gravitational Waves group.
There, she is closely involved in developing methods to distinguish signals from distant colliding black holes or neutron stars from the background noise in the detectors. This is made possible by comparing model signals with the measurements.
The first gravitational wave ever was detected in 2015, using the two LIGO detectors in the US. Haney was in Mumbai, India, at the time and a member of the Virgo/LIGO collaboration, and she still remembers the excitement vividly. “People were, above all, very nervous. There were indications of a signal, but we really couldn’t afford to make a mistake.”
In that respect, the announcement in early 2016 wasn’t even such a historic moment. “We’d been calculating the signal in the strictest confidence for months; we knew it inside out. Actually, the publication was mainly a relief that we were finally allowed to talk about it.”
That first detection of a gravitational wave marked the beginning of a new era, in which gravitational-wave astronomy has become a proper discipline. “A new way of looking at the universe. In that sense, I now also call myself an astronomer, even though I am, of course, a physicist.”
Her new appointment, Haney explains, is intended to broaden the VU’s efforts in the field of gravitational waves. “I am much more of a mathematical physicist than my colleagues who are involved in the experiments, which sometimes border on engineering.”
Haney: “The idea is that I will build a bridge between the students, who are often very interested in theory, and the much more practical world of experiments. I gently nudge them from Einstein to the Einstein Telescope, so to speak. I am very excited to become a member of the VU science faculty in this way.”
Her interest in gravitational waves dates back to her student days, but it wasn’t a premeditated plan. “Gravitational waves were still a thing of the future back then. Most of the research was focused on LISA, a gigantic detector in orbit around the Sun. I remember the despair when NASA pulled the plug on that.”
LISA has since been given a new lease of life under the leadership of ESA, and Nikhef is also involved in the hardware side of things. Haney is involved in the development of methods and infrastructure for processing LISA signals.
“Essentially the same questions you see arising around the Einstein Telescope. In current detectors, you get one observation per day or week. In the new generation of instruments, that becomes a hundred a day. How do you find all those signals, how much computing power is needed, how do you organise something like that.”
But these are the kinds of challenges a physicist dreams of. “I can genuinely look forward to what we can learn about the universe with the Einstein Telescope or LISA. For example, I’m fascinated by the question of how the gigantic black holes at the centre of galaxies actually form. You can do all the calculations you like, but it is so exciting to actually see it happen in the real universe.”
