Who are you?

My name is Zach Korth. I’m a graduate student here at Caltech, working in Prof. Rana Adhikari’s group on experimental gravitational wave physics. The bulk of my time goes to developing and testing technology that will be installed at the detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston, LA, and Hanford, WA. Run jointly by Caltech and MIT, LIGO is poised to make the first ever direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples of space-time itself propagating across the universe at the speed of light, carrying with them information about the most distant and poorly understood astrophysical phenomena thought to exist.

At the LIGO Hanford control room.