Fritschel, Peter
Oral history interview with Peter Fritschel, 2020 September 2.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Peter Fritschel, Senior Research Scientist in the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics at MIT. Fritshel explains the historical connections between Kavli, Caltech, MIT, and the overall LIGO collaboration. He recounts his childhood in South Dakota, then New York City, and then back to South Dakota in support of his fathers academic career. Fritschel discusses his undergraduate education at Swarthmore, where he pursued degrees in physics and engineering, and he discusses his post-college work at Raytheon on CO2 lasers in its research division. He describes the events leading to his admission to MIT for graduate school where he joined Rai Weisss research lab, and he explains the progress that the lab had made on interferometers at that point in the mid-1980s. Fritschel explains the utility of his background in lasers for Weisss lab, and the significance of Caltechs involvement in the LIGO project. He discusses the relationship between his thesis research on making an interferometer with a power recycling configuration in two arms, and LIGO. Fritschel describes his intent to leave MIT after he defended, and he considered opportunities more broadly in atomic, molecular, and optical physics, which led to his work in Orsay, France, with Alain Brillet and Adelberto Giazotto, the founders of the Virgo collaboration. He explains his decision to return to MIT, and how his work in France was useful for his return to LIGO. He explains how LIGO had advanced during his absence, he discusses his contributions to improving the sensitivity of the gravitational interferometers, and he describes how LIGO had made consistent progress over many years and not all at once with the detection of gravitational waves in 2015. Fritschel explains that the Nobel Prize given to LIGOs principal scientists recognized the collaboration both as a theoretical and an experimental endeavor, and he describes the overall positive impact that this recognition had on the collaboration as it continues to push discovery in gravitational wave research and the advances in both physics and engineering that are required for LIGO to realize its future goals. At the end of the interview, Fritschel conveys the centrality of LIGOs study of black holes and neutron stars in order to harness the collaborations ability to garner new insights on the early Universe.
American physicist. Ph.D. physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1992). Principal Investigator, Senior Research Scientist, Director, LIGO at MIT; Chief Detector Scientist, LIGO Laboratory. Professional accomplishments include: Recipient of the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics; One of three recipients of the 2018 Berkeley Prize in Astronomy; Received Opticas Charles H. Townes Medal in 2018; Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America.
Barish, B.C. (Barry Clark), 1936-
Vogt, Rochus, 1929-
Weiss, Rainer
LIGO (Observatory)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Interferometers.
Lasers
Physical optics
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Brillet, Alain
Fritschel, Peter
Zierler, David, 1979-, interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA