Conversations
Squeezed Light and New Horizons
OPN talks with Nergis Mavalvala, whose FIO+LS plenary talk recounted amazing recent improvements to the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave observatories.
[Image: Bryce Vickmark]
At September’s Frontiers in Optics+Laser Science (FIO+LS) virtual meeting, OSA Fellow Nergis Mavalvala of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, awed the online audience by detailing recent improvements to the sensitivity of the already mind-bendingly precise LIGO and Virgo laser-interferometer gravitational-wave (GW) observatories. Those improvements traced largely to the injection of so-called squeezed light into the interferometer, to reduce noise attributable to infinitesimal fluctuations in the quantum vacuum (for more on squeezed light, see www.osa-opn.org/news/ligo-squeeze).
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