Mavalvala has also worked on the development of exotic quantum states of light, and in particular the generation of light in squeezed coherent states. By injecting such states into the kilometre-scale Michelson interferometer of the LIGO detectors, her group greatly improved the sensitivity of the detector by reducing quantum noise; such squeezed states also have many other applications in experimental physics. Her group was the first to generate squeezed light using optomechanics at room temperature, compared to all previous optomechanical squeezed light sources that operated at cryogenic (very low) temperatures.