In 2016, LIGO has announced two signals were detected from the merging of two black holes, contributing to the direct detection of gravitational waves. As an MIT graduate student also working at LIGO Hanford Observatory, in this talk, I will introduce and explain the LIGO detector with its sub-systems. I will also talk about the current situation of LIGO and the optomechanical experiment conducted at the MIT LIGO laboratory.

Bio: Haocun Yu (于皓存) is a 2nd year graduate student at MIT, working on instrument development for the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). Supervised by Professor Nergis Mavalvala, Haocun is doing optomechanics research to study radiation pressure at the MIT LIGO laboratory. She also works at LIGO Hanford Observatory as an LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) fellow. Haocun received a BSci in Physics with Theoretical Physics from Imperial College London in 2015.