Shivaraj Kandhasamy

Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Physics, UMN, 2007; Research Assistant, Dept. of Physics, UMN, 2008 - till date.

Hoff Lu fellowship, Dept. of Physics, UMN (2009); Junior Research Fellowship (UGC) and Eligibility for Lectureship, Government of India (2006, 2007).

For my PhD thesis, I am working on the detection gravitational waves using LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory) data. Particularly, my research focuses on the search for stochastic signals as well as long duration transient gravitational wave signals. Since gravitational waves interact very weakly with other particles, it can carry the details of their sources to far away distances without dissipation. Hence intercepting these waves can reveal important information about their sources (for example neutron stars) which are otherwise impossible to obtain. Also it is strongly believed that gravitational waves, generally stochastic in nature, were produced in the early universe and hence by studying them we would be able to understand the state of the universe just a few moments after the Big Bang.