Loyola Physics senior Sandrine Ferrans was accepted into the highly selective LIGO Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program to pursue research at Caltech over the summer 2018. LIGO stands for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory, and Sandrine worked on a project called In-Situ Laser Mode Spectroscopy for Mirror Phase Mapping.

The purpose of this experiment is to create a high precision mirror map, so that optical losses and noise can be evaluated and minimized. The technique can be applied to the LIGO detectors because it does not disturb the laser used for gravitational wave detection.