Raymond Y. Chiao is an American physicist best known for his experimental work in quantum optics.

He is currently an emeritus faculty member at the University of California, Merced physics department, where he is conducting research on gravitational radiation in collaboration with Prof. Jay Sharping.

Raymond Chiao was born in Hong Kong on October 9, 1940, and moved as a child to the United States in 1947.

He was admitted to Princeton University in 1957 as an electrical engineer, but then switched to the physics department, where he worked on a senior thesis project given to him by John Archibald Wheeler on the quantization of general relativity.

As of 2006, he accepted a faculty position at UC Merced and turned his full energy on the project of detecting gravitational waves through the use of superconductors.