Jeff Kimble and Foundations for Quantum Precision Measurement in LIGO

LIGO today is detecting several black hole collisions each week, compared to one every six weeks in its first few years (2015-2017), thanks in considerable measure to frequency-dependent squeezing of vacuum fluctuations that enter LIGO’s interferometers through their dark port. The ideas for how best to achieve this frequency-dependent squeezing were conceived by Jeff Kimble in the 1980s and 1990s, and he and his colleagues pioneered and developed the necessary squeeze techniques and instrumentation. In this lecture I will describe Kimble’s pioneering work and how the LIGO team, building on it, has produced the modern Quantum Precision Measurement technology that is so crucial to LIGO today, and to future gravitational-wave science.