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Sanika Khadkikar

Sanika Khadkikar — Graduate Student
Office: 317 Whitmore Laboratory
Address: 104 Davey Lab PMB 258, University Park PA 16801
sbk6031@psu.edu
Sanika Khadkikar
ICDS Physics LIGO Multimessenger Astrophysics CMA

I'm Sanika (pronounced Saa-nee-kah) from Mulund, a small suburb in Mumbai, India. I am a third-year graduate student working with Prof. Bangalore Sathyaprakash at the PAX group. I completed an integrated bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering and a master's in Physics from BITS Pilani in India. During that time, I developed a deep fascination with neutron stars and decided to pursue a PhD at Penn State to study them more closely. At Penn State, I'm exploring the many facets of neutron stars. From using gravitational waves to infer their properties in binary mergers to studying how exotic forms of matter might exist inside them, I approach neutron stars from multiple angles. My goal is to incrementally deepen our understanding of their equation of state.

If you're curious to find out more about my research, feel free to check out my website linked below!

Visit my website

Publications
  1. Sanika Khadkikar, Ish Gupta, Rahul Kashyap, Koustav Chandra, Rossella Gamba, Bangalore Sathyaprakash “Cosmic Calipers: Precise and Accurate Neutron Star Radius Measurements with Next-Generation Gravitational Wave Detectors.” (2025)
  2. Ish Gupta, others “Characterizing gravitational wave detector networks: from A^♯ to cosmic explorer.” Class. Quant. Grav. 41 24 (2024) doi:10.1088/1361-6382/ad7b99
  3. Matthew Evans, others “Cosmic Explorer: A Submission to the NSF MPSAC ngGW Subcommittee.” (2023)
  4. Sanika Khadkikar, Chatrik Mangat, Sarmistha Banik “Quasi-stationary sequences of hyper massive neutron stars with exotic equations of state.” (2022)
  5. Sanika Khadkikar, Adriana Raduta, Micaela Oertel, Armen Sedrakian “Maximum mass of compact stars from gravitational wave events with finite-temperature equations of state.” Phys. Rev. C 103 5 (2021) doi:10.1103/PhysRevC.103.055811
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.