All-reflective coupling of two optical cavities with 3-port diffraction gratings
Abstract
The shot-noise limited sensitivity of Michelson-type laser interferometers with Fabry-Perot arm cavities can be increased by the so-called power-recycling technique. In such a scheme the power-recycling cavity is optically coupled with the interferometer's arm cavities. A problem arises because the central coupling mirror transmits a rather high laser power and may show thermal lensing, thermo-refractive noise and photo-thermo-refractive noise. Cryogenic cooling of this mirror is also challenging, and thus thermal noise becomes a general problem. Here, we theoretically investigate an all-reflective coupling scheme of two optical cavities based on a 3-port diffraction grating. We show that power-recycling of a high-finesse arm cavity is possible without transmitting any laser power through a substrate material. The power splitting ratio of the three output ports of the grating is, surprisingly, noncritical.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1004.2141,
title = {All-reflective coupling of two optical cavities with 3-port diffraction gratings},
author = {Oliver Burmeister and Michael Britzger and André Thüring and Daniel Friedrich and Frank Brückner and Karsten Danzmann and Roman Schnabel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1004.2141},
year = {2015}
}