A novel instrumented baffle surrounding the suspended end mirror in the input mode cleaner cavity of the Virgo interferometer was installed in spring 2021. Since then, the device has been regularly operated in the experiment and the obtained results indicate a good agreement with simulations of the stray light inside the optical cavity. The baffle will operate in the upcoming O4 observation run, serving as a demonstrator of the technology designed to instrument the baffles in front of the main mirrors in time for O5. In this paper we present a detailed description of the baffle design, including mechanics, front-end electronics, data acquisition, as well as optical and vacuum tests, calibration and installation procedures, and performance results.
@article{arxiv.2210.16313,
title = {An instrumented baffle for the Advanced Virgo Input Mode Cleaner End Mirror},
author = {M. Andres-Carcasona and O. Ballester and O. Blanch and J. Campos and G. Caneva and L. Cardiel and M. Cavalli-Sforza and P. Chiggiato and A. Chiummo and J. A. Ferreira and J. M. Illa and C. Karathanasis and M. Kolstein and M. Martinez and A. Macquet and A. Menendez-Vazquez and Ll. M. Mir and J. Mundet and A. Pasqualetti and O. Piccinni and C. Pio and A. Romero-Rodriguez and D. Serrano and V. Dattilo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.16313},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
12 pages, 21 figures, 3 tables, to be submitted to PRD