Big breakthrough

Extra-sensitive microwave detectors may soon help scientists find out what happened immediately after the Big Bang.

The sensors have been developed via an academic collaboration at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The work included contributions from NIST, Princeton University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Chicago.

NIST was involved with a previous project that studied cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the faint afterglow of the Big Bang that still fills the universe. This project previously built superconducting amplifiers and cameras for CMB experiments at the South Pole, in balloon-borne observatories, and on the Atacama Plateau in Chile.

The new experiment will begin approximately one year from now in the Chilean desert and will consist of placing a large array of powerful NIST sensors on a telescope mounted in a converted shipping container.

The detectors will look for subtle fingerprints in the CMB from primordial gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of space-time from the violent birth of the universe more than 13 billion years ago.