Rana Adhikari, Professor of Physics, Caltech
We are fortunate to live in a universe filled with exciting neighbors, such as black holes. But where do they come from and what are they doing? And what really happened at the end of that binary neutron star merger? To answer these and other pressing questions, the LIGO interferometers are taking the first of several steps in a quantum makeover, beginning with the use of squeezed light. In this talk, I will outline an experimental program to add several pieces to our astrophysical toolkit: early warnings of neutron star mergers, black hole spectroscopy, precision tests of gravity and popular models of cosmology.