Related papers: Using the etalon effect for in-situ balancing of t…
The operation of an interferometer for gravitational waves detection requires sophisticated feedback controls in many parts of the apparatus. The aim of this lecture is to introduce the types of problems to be faced in this line of…
The shot-noise limited peak sensitivity of cavity-enhanced interferometric measurement devices, such as gravitational-wave detectors, can be improved by increasing the cavity finesse, even when comparing fixed intra-cavity light powers. For…
Axions have attracted attention as promising candidates for dark matter (DM). Although axions have been intensively searched for, they have not been observed yet. Recently, novel experiments to search for axion DM have been proposed that…
The VIRGO superattenuator (SA) is effective in depressing the seismic noise below the thermal noise level above 4 Hz. On the other hand, the residual mirror motion associated to the SA normal modes can saturate the dynamics of the…
Sidles and Sigg have shown that advanced LIGO interferometers will encounter a serious tilt instability, in which symmetric tilts of the mirrors of an arm cavity cause the cavity's light beam to slide sideways, so its radiation pressure…
We improve the precision of the interferometric weak-value-based beam deflection measurement by introducing a power recycling mirror, creating a resonant cavity. This results in \emph{all} the light exiting to the detector with a large…
The topic of this thesis is the theoretical analysis of the optomechanical coupling effects in a high-finesse optical cavity, and the experimental realization of such a device. Radiation pressure exerted by light limits the sensitivity of…
The gravitational-wave detectors outputs from the LIGO and Virgo collaborations have been a source of scientific results of prime importance in various domains such as astrophysics, cosmology or fundamental physics. With the upgrades of the…
The sensitivity achievable by a pair of VIRGO detectors to stochastic and isotropic gravitational wave backgrounds of cosmological origin is discussed in view of the development of a second VIRGO interferometer. We describe a…
This thesis presents a collection of different researches on non-standard optics in view of enhancing the performances of the Advanced Gravitational waves interferometric detectors, where the thermal noise of the test masses is expected to…
Variable curvature mirrors of large amplitude are designed by using finite element analysis. The specific case studied reaches at least a 800 {\mu}m sag with an optical quality better than {\lambda}/5 over a 120 mm clear aperture. We…
A methodology of adaptive time series analysis, based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), and on its time varying version tvf-EMD has been applied to strain data from the gravitational wave interferometer (IFO) Virgo in order to…
As the first generation of laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors near operation, research and development has begun on increasing the instrument's sensitivity while utilizing the existing infrastructure. In the Laser…
Stray light represents a significant noise source for gravitational wave detectors, requiring an accurate modeling and mitigation to preserve the experiment's sensitivity. In this article, we present an updated and improved analysis of the…
Virgo is a kilometer-length interferometer for gravitational waves detection located near Pisa. Its first science run, VSR1, occured from May to October 2007. The aims of the calibration are to measure the detector sensitivity and to…
We consider in this paper the angular deviation and diffraction efficiency of the reflection gratings in Littrow-configuration for applications of external cavity diode laser using the rigorous coupled-wave analysis method. We consider the…
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…
We present an integrated optomechanical and electromechanical nanocavity, in which a common mechanical degree of freedom is coupled to an ultrahigh-Q photonic crystal defect cavity and an electrical circuit. The sys- tem allows for…
Although the gravitational waves observed by advanced LIGO and Virgo are consistent with compact binaries in a quasi-circular inspiral prior to coalescence, eccentric inspirals are also expected to occur in Nature. Due to their complexity,…
For future configurations, we study the relation between the abatement of the noise sources and the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) for coalescing binaries. Our aim is not the proposition of a new design, but an indication of where in the…