TY - JOUR

T1 - Demonstration of the optical AC coupling technique at the advanced LIGO gravitational wave detector

AU - Kaufer, S.

AU - Kasprzack, M.

AU - Frolov, V.

AU - Willke, B.

N1 - Funding information: LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation. It operates under Cooperative Agreement No. PHY-0757058. Advanced LIGO was built under Grant No. PHY-0823459. MK wants to acknowledge NSF Grant No. PHY-1505779 and Grant No. PHY-1205882. The corresponding author was supported by the Max Planck Society, Germany, and the LSC Fellows program. The LIGO Document Number of this document is LIGO-P1700010.

PY - 2017

Y1 - 2017

N2 - Lasers for gravitational wave detectors need to fulfill tight requirements in amplitude stability, which can only be met by means of feedback control loops. Ultimately, power stabilization control loops are limited by the shot noise of their sensor. The power noise increases linearly with the amount of detected power, while the shot noise grows with the square root. Increasing the detected power is therefore a suitable means to reach a lower sensing noise but it is limited by the power handling capabilities of the photodiodes. An alternative way of improving the sensitivity is the optical AC coupling technique, which exploits the high pass behavior of an optical resonator to reduce the optical power on the detector without compromising its sensitivity above the corner frequency. In this paper we investigate the optical AC coupling technique at the aLIGO Livingston gravitational wave detector. We measured an optical AC coupling gain of 10 dB in the gravitational wave detection band, which offers the potential to improve the laser power stability by the same factor.

AB - Lasers for gravitational wave detectors need to fulfill tight requirements in amplitude stability, which can only be met by means of feedback control loops. Ultimately, power stabilization control loops are limited by the shot noise of their sensor. The power noise increases linearly with the amount of detected power, while the shot noise grows with the square root. Increasing the detected power is therefore a suitable means to reach a lower sensing noise but it is limited by the power handling capabilities of the photodiodes. An alternative way of improving the sensitivity is the optical AC coupling technique, which exploits the high pass behavior of an optical resonator to reduce the optical power on the detector without compromising its sensitivity above the corner frequency. In this paper we investigate the optical AC coupling technique at the aLIGO Livingston gravitational wave detector. We measured an optical AC coupling gain of 10 dB in the gravitational wave detection band, which offers the potential to improve the laser power stability by the same factor.

KW - gravitational wave detector

KW - optical AC coupling

KW - power stabilization

KW - shot noise

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85021672538&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1088/1361-6382/aa7119

DO - 10.1088/1361-6382/aa7119

M3 - Article

VL - 34

JO - Classical and quantum gravity

JF - Classical and quantum gravity

SN - 0264-9381

IS - 14

M1 - 145001

ER -