Advanced Interferometric Gravitational-wave Detectors: Essentials of Gravitational Wave Detectors / Advanced Ligo…

David Reitze is the Executive Director of the LIGO Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and a Professor of Physics at the University of Florida.

Reitze began working extensively in experimental gravitational-wave science in 1996, where he led the design and construction efforts for the ‘Input Optics’ subsystem of the both the Initial and Advanced LIGO interferometers. He has also extensively studied and characterized the effects of thermo-optical distortions in LIGO optical systems produced by the absorption of high average power lasers and has developed several methods for minimizing them. From 2007 through 2011, he served as the elected Spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. In 2011, he took a long-term leave of absence from the University of Florida to join Caltech as the Executive Director of the LIGO Laboratory.

Reitze has authored or co-authored over 280 peer-reviewed publications. He was selected as a Cottrell Scholar in 1996, a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2006, and a Fellow of the Optical Society in 2015. He shared the 2017 National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery with Peter Saulson and Gabriela Gonzalez for his leadership role in LIGO.

Peter Saulson is the Martin A Pomerantz ’37 Professor of Physics at Syracuse University. He has been on the faculty at Syracuse since 1991.

Saulson’s research career has been focused on the search for gravitational waves, in particular on the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Saulson helped to lead early engineering design studies, and was one of the authors of the Blue Book that made the case for building LIGO. One of the early leaders of the field, he has served in many ways, including two terms as the elected Spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. For his leadership role, Saulson is a recipient of the 2017 National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery (shared with David Reitze and with Gabriela Gonzalez).

Saulson was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003 and was named a Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation in 2013.

Saulson is also the author of Fundamentals of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors (1994, second edition 2017), the first introductory textbook in the field.

Hartmut Grote is a Professor of Physics at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.

Grote has worked in experimental gravitational-wave science since 1998, foremost at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) and Leibniz University of Hannover in Germany. He served as the scientific leader of the German-British gravitational-wave detector GEO600 from 2009 to 2017. His contributions to the field comprise novel lock acquisition schemes, automatic alignment solutions, the investigation of signal recycling and DC readout, and the application of squeezed states of light to gravitational-wave detectors.

Grote is also author of the book Gravitationswellen — Geschichte einer Jahrhundertentdeckung (in German), a short history of both the field and the first detections of gravitational waves, published in 2018.