Richard Graham

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Richard is a PhD student working with the ring laser project.

Richard completed his B.Sc in physics 2004 at the University of Canterbury with a 3rd year project with the ring laser group. In 2005 and 2006 he completed a M.Sc with the ring laser group looking at mapping the distribution of excited states in a Helium-Neon discharge.

His Ph.D research is focusing on the development of novel techniques for operating these devices. The main aim of these techniques is the enlargement of the available design parameter space for ring laser gyroscopes - allowing both much larger and much smaller devices to be constructed, thus increasing the overall applicability of ring laser gyroscopes to a wide variety of scientific applications. This means investigating techniques to reduce the lock in threshold and associated Adler pulling as well as measuring and correcting for geometric distortions in large laser cavities.

The majority of the experimental work involves the UG-2 ring laser.