Jonathan Richardson, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside, has received the university’s highest-tier Research and Economic Development (RED) seed grant for the winning proposal in the Fundamental Research category.
The competitive $100,000 grant will support Richardson’s efforts to develop machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) tools to optimize the design of future gravitational-wave detectors, with the goal of improving their sensitivity by a factor of 10 over the next decade.
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time generated by cataclysmic events such as colliding black holes and neutron stars. First detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015, they have given scientists a powerful new way to study the universe.
“While optical imperfections are unavoidable in LIGO and future detectors, their impact on the sensitivity of different detector configurations can vary dramatically due to the complex interaction of the coupled laser cavities,” Richardson said. “My prior work on this issue has shown that there is potential to achieve significantly greater quantum noise reduction in future detectors.”
The research will support development of LIGO A#, a planned upgrade to the existing LIGO detectors, and Cosmic Explorer, a proposed next-generation U.S. observatory designed to detect gravitational-wave signals from nearly the edge of the observable universe.
Richardson joined UCR in 2021 after serving as a LIGO Laboratory postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, where he helped commission the Advanced LIGO detectors. He is collaborating on the project with co-principal investigator Vagelis Papalexakis, a UCR professor of computer science and engineering whose expertise in ML/AI complements Richardson’s work in gravitational-wave instrumentation.