Jaime Alvarez
MIT Department: Physics
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Nergis Mavalvala
Research Supervisor: Eric Oelker, Begüm Kabagöz
Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Berkley
Website:
Biography
Jaime Alvarez is a rising senior majoring in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.He hopes to obtain a PhD in Physics and pursue an academic career. At the University of Southern California, he worked with Dr. Kris Pardo, using astrometric techniques to explore properties of gravitational waves, focusing on the chirp mass and distance of supermassive black hole binaries.At MIT, Jaime works with Dr. Nergis Mavalvala and Dr. Eric Oelker in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) lab. During the summer of 2024, he worked on the GRAVITES project, where he built a servo board for laser stabilization and assembled a high vacuum chamber for optical noise reduction. For the summer of 2025, he is returning to the MIT LIGO lab to assist with the assembling and characterizing of a new Optical Parametric Oscillator (OPO) cavity for the LIGO Hanford Observatory. He is also helping develop a prototype squeezed light source to study new nonlinear materials for squeezed vacuum generation to increase the source’s lifetime and reduce optical loss. Jaime hopes to inspire others to pursue their curiosity and achieve their goals, regardless of their background
Abstract
Higher Order Mode Generation for Optical Damping of Parametric Instabilities in LIGO
Jaime Alvarez1, Begüm Kabagöz2, Eric Oelker2, and Nergis Mavalvala2
1Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley
2Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
During the most recent observation run of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the detector suffered multiple lock losses due to parametric instabilities(PIs) driven by higher-order modes (HOMs) in the interferometer arm cavities. Currently, certain PIs are mitigated by the thermal compensation system (TCS), which shifts the resonant frequency of the HOMs to stable positions. However, as arm power increases, PIs become increasingly disruptive, and the TCS method is no longer viable. A more robust method is optical damping, which involves injecting a HOM with the opposite phase to dampen the PI-coupled target mode. In this project, we aim to generate target HOMs for injection into the cavities. We first developed a script implementing the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm for phase mask generation, typically achieving over 95% beam overlap after approximately 20-30 iterations. We then built a tabletop setup using a spatial light modulator with two phase masks on its screen; the first allows amplitude shaping, while the second corrects phase. In the future, we will characterize the generated beam profiles with a phase camera, then inject them into a reference cavity to assess mode coupling. Ultimately, implementing optical damping will help
suppress PIs and improve LIGO’s stability and observation time.
