Two Months In

It’s hard to comprehend two months have flown by since I first arrived at LHO in June. In that time, I’ve attended a regional conference, presented at collaboration meetings, gone on a public tour with legendary Fred Raab, explored more of southeastern Washington, and licked the concrete encasing the X-arm beam tube. That last one has been a joke back home since before I even got here, but little did everyone know I was very serious about this task.

This won't be in the official fellowship report. "I'm going to lick the LIGO arm" was basically my catchphrase before I left. Two months in, I made good on it. 10/10, would recommend.

Read on for the rest of the recap.

HAM7 Day

One of my favorite days this summer was getting hands-on in the LVEA with HAM7 (Horizontal Access Module 7), which houses the quantum squeezer and its crystal — it converts one higher-energy photon into two lower-energy ones to produce squeezed light, giving us more sensitivity at higher frequencies and letting us beat the quantum noise limit. More on the squeezer here.

Working in-chamber meant full “bunny suit” garb to keep our human contamination away from the detector. Once suited up, I assisted staff scientist Camilla Compton with aligning laser beams — laser alignment cards and my iPhone camera doing the work of seeing the near-infrared and green light. Only a couple of hours of adjusting the squeezer paths, but in layers of clean-room garb it felt like a full workout. Worth it to see one of the optics tables up close before the chamber doors closed. Also worth noting: a snake made its way into the clean room at some point this summer, which is not a sentence I expected to type when I signed up for a physics fellowship.

Outside the chamber, control room life has its own rhythm of problem solving — and I’ve found my favorite seat in the house.

GWANW: Hosting the GW Explorer Tutorial

A highlight of the last few weeks was the Gravitational Wave Astrophysics in the Northwest (GWANW) meeting, held right here at LHO. I presented my home research on Early Warning GWs and hosted a tutorial built around my GW Explorer project (read about the project: GW Explorer Workshop at Las Vegas Academy). Getting real researchers to actually use the tutorial was the best kind of validation — lots of positive feedback, interest from potential contributors, and even requests to translate it into more languages. Excited to see it grow beyond the Las Vegas bubble it started in.

A Saturday Tour with Fred Raab

I tagged along on one of the First Saturday Public Tours, led by Fred Raab, who’s been with LIGO since the very beginning. Getting the history from someone who was actually there isn’t something I take for granted, so I showed up on a Saturday for this one. Fred told us about the installation and what’s been learned after 20 years of running. My favorite detail: the beam tubes were insulated when installed, but after years at Livingston the insulation started failing — turned out rodents had been chewing through it, and crews had to walk the 4km arms pulling insulation out by hand. An instrument that can measure changes smaller than a fraction of a proton, nearly taken down by rats. Every tour I join, I notice something new.

Outside of Work

My favorite weekends have been exploring the Tri-Cities and beyond — the Pasco Farmers Market on a Saturday morning, and a drive out to Walla Walla for wine tasting with a few people from the observatory. We’ve also hit more cafes than I can count. The fellows and operators made it out to Art in the Park around Richland, packed with local artist booths and food trucks.

Another fellow and I made it out to the Boating Derby, watching car and lawn-mower racing that closed out with boats getting dragged into each other by trucks. There was also a LIGO BBQ, where I painted astronomy-inspired magnets, brought my (famous) buffalo chicken dip, and made friends with Daniel Sigg’s cat — followed by a very serious round of homemade ice cream, made with liquid nitrogen because apparently that’s just how LIGO does dessert.

A second round of liquid-nitrogen ice cream later in the summer, protective gloves and all. Then on a completely different night, a stop at a neon-lit shop we only found because we were driving around with no plan.

Miranda's liquid-nitrogen ice-cream experiment, and the neon-lit ice cream shop we discovered on a craving.

The fellows and Summer Undergradute Research Fellows (SURF) students gathered for a group photo to close out the summer before heading back home for classes. I miss you all already!

The whole crew, boards in hand, pretending we knew what we were doing.

We decided to wind down here by feeding the ducks and geese along the river.

A duck holding its ground on a rock, the pond crew, and the geese who run the riverbank.

Wildfire smoke rolled through for a stretch too, turning the sky a deep orange by afternoon. Eerie to be outside in it, but it made for one of the more striking sunsets I've seen here.

The sun attenuating through the smoke haze.

And after Thursday dinner one week, a few of us went on a walk to catch the lunar eclipse, the moon slipping into shadow right over the house like it had been scheduled just for us.

The eclipse mid-shadow, and the moment it dipped just above the house.

--- Two months in out of my six month stay and this experience has already been so fulfilling. As I am writing this, we just locked the Y-arm of the interferometer after pumping down the corner station for the past month. I'm really excited to be here as we continue commissioning the detector and move into the upcoming Observing Run in November. Thanks for reading and check back in soon for more updates!