Nikitha Kuntimaddi

Research

I am a first year PhD student with the Gravity Exploration Institute at Cardiff School of Physics and Astronomy. My thesis is focused on designing optical filter cavities for single-photon readout for table-top interferometers. My supervisors are Prof Hartmut Grote, Prof Kate Dooley and Dr Keiko Kokeyama.

In this larger scale version of the QUEST experiment, two co-located interferometers have arm lengths of 5 m each. To bypass photon shot noise, which is the limiting noise source at high frequencies, this experiment plans to use the single photon readout technique. In this technique, the light exiting the interferometer's output port is reduced to a point where the detector can see a single photon per second. This reduction can be done using a series of optical filter cavities. These cavities can be designed and tuned to only transmit the signal-carrying photons, which are so small in number that they can be detected by a single-photon detector.