Rana X. Adhikari

In January 2020, Scientific Inquirer posted an exchange between Australian recording artist Tex Crick and Adhikari, in which they discuss time travel using a mirror and listening to music in four dimensions. He was on the Y combinator podcast discussing the technical challenges of measuring gravitational waves. He also appeared on Seeker's The Good, the Bad, and the Science Podcast (The Science of Men in Black) and has collaborated with Pioneer Works' Director of Sciences Janna Levin.

Adhikari is actively involved in the LIGO-India project, which aims to build a gravitational-wave observatory in India. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of Optica (formerly known as Optical Society of America). Since 2019 he has been a member of the Infosys Prize jury for physical sciences.

In July 2017, he was part of Limits of Knowing, a month-long set of exhibitions and programs organized with the Berliner Festspiele. For this exhibition, he presented a prototype of an artwork designed to sense the environment of the Martin-Gropius-Bau. The 30 x 30 x 130 cm immersive mixed media artwork named Untitled reacted to the space and all objects in it (including the visitors) by recording a variety of data: the building's vibrations, sounds, temperature, magnetic fields, and levels of infrared light.

On February 17, 2016, less than a week after LIGO's landmark announcement about the detection of gravitational waves, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the Cabinet has granted 'in-principle' approval to the LIGO-India mega science proposal. The Indian gravitational-wave detector would be only the sixth such observatory in the world and will be similar to the two U.S. detectors in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed on March 31, 2016, between the Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science & Technology in India and the National Science Foundation of the U.S. to develop the observatory in India.

Adhikari works on the experimental physics of gravitational wave detection and is among the scientists responsible for the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) that discovered gravitational waves in 2015. He, along with Lisa Barsotti and Matt Evans from MIT, received the New Horizons in Physics Prize in 2019 for research on current and future earth-based gravitational wave detectors. His research focus is on the areas of precision measurement related to surpassing fundamental physical limits to discover new phenomena related to gravity, quantum mechanics, and the true nature of space and time.

In 2007, during the International Conference on Gravitation and Cosmology (ICGC) at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, the idea of having a LIGO observatory in India was first proposed by Rana X. Adhikari. The IndIGO Consortium was formed in 2009 and since then has been planning a roadmap for gravitational-wave astronomy and a phased strategy towards Indian participation in realizing a gravitational-wave observatory in the Asia-Pacific region.

Adhikari was born in the U.S. state of Ohio to Indian Bengali immigrants from Raiganj, West Bengal, India. They moved to Cape Canaveral, Florida when he was seven. He studied physics at the University of Florida, where he worked with David Reitze, and graduated in 1998 with a bachelor's degree. In 2004, he received a PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of experimental physicist Rainer Weiss, and joined Caltech's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project as a postdoctoral researcher. Adhikari was promoted as an assistant professor in 2006 and become a tenured professor of physics in 2012. He has also been an adjunct professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ICTS-TIFR) in Bengaluru, India, since 2012.

Adhikari has been involved in the construction and design of gravitational-wave detectors since 1997. He started working on laser interferometers as a graduate student at MIT, with a particular focus on the variety of noise sources, feedback loops and subsystems, and helped to reduce the noise in all 3 of the LIGO interferometers while working on the Livingston interferometer. In 2005, he received the first LIGO thesis prize.

Rana X. Adhikari (born 1974) is an American experimental physicist. He is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an associate faculty member of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ICTS-TIFR).