Achievement

Physics IGERT graduate student Mary Salit (advisor, Selim Shariar, EECS; co-advisor, John Ketterson, Physics) completed her doctoral thesis entitled Intracavity Fast Light for Rotation Sensing and Gravitational Wave Detection. A key achievement of her research was the development of a new technique for detecting gravitational waves with a much higher sensitivity and bandwidth than what is possible under the current design of the LIGO detector. This work is now being considered by the LIGO laboratory for implementation in the future. This research was highly interdisciplinary, combining the techniques of Electrical Engineering based design, analysis and experiment involving quantum coherence induced dispersion, with the field of Astrophysics, in the form of General Relativistic analysis of gravitational wave detection. Several theoretical and experimental papers have been published or under review pertaining to this invention.