Parametric instabilities have long been studied as a potentially limiting effect in high-power interferometric gravitational wave detectors. Until now, however, these instabilities have never been observed in a kilometer-scale interferometer. In this work we describe the first observation of parametric instability in an Advanced LIGO detector, and the means by which it has been removed as a barrier to progress.
@article{arxiv.1502.06058,
title = {Observation of Parametric Instability in Advanced LIGO},
author = {Matthew Evans and Slawek Gras and Peter Fritschel and John Miller and Lisa Barsotti and Denis Martynov and Aidan Brooks and Dennis Coyne and Rich Abbott and Rana Adhikari and Koji Arai and Rolf Bork and Bill Kells and Jameson Rollins and Nicolas Smith-Lefebvre and Gabriele Vajente and Hiroaki Yamamoto and Ryan Derosa and Anamaria Effler and Keiko Kokeyama and Joseph Betzweiser and Valera Frolov and Adam Mullavey and Sheila Dwyer and Kiwamu Izumi and Keita Kawabe and Daniel Sigg and Stefan Ballmer and Thomas J. Massinger and Alexa Staley and Chris Mueller and Hartmut Grote and Robert Ward and Eleanor King and Keith Thorne and Michael Thomas and Carl Adams and Stuart Aston and Janeen Romie and Arnaud Pele and Matthew Heinze and David Blair and Li Ju and Chunnong Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.06058},
year = {2015}
}