Related papers: Piezo-deformable Mirrors for Active Mode Matching …
With the LIGO announcement of the first direct detection of gravitational waves (GWs), the GW Astronomy was formally ushered into our age. After one-hundred years of theoretical investigation and fifty years of experimental endeavor, this…
Light in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) spans wavelengths from 3-8 $\mu$m and is important to many applications such as gas sensing and thermal imaging. Due to materials challenges, there is currently a lack of mid-IR reconfigurable optical…
As part of the Advanced LIGO+ (A+) project we have developed, produced, and characterised sensors and electronics to interrogate new optical suspensions. The central element is a displacement sensor with an integrated electromagnetic…
Optical beams and starlight distorted by atmospheric turbulence can be corrected with adaptive optics systems to enable efficient coupling into single-mode fibers. Deformable mirrors, used to flatten the wavefront in astronomical…
We study frequency dependent (FD) input-output schemes for signal-recycling interferometers, the baseline design of Advanced LIGO and the current configuration of GEO 600. Complementary to a recent proposal by Harms et al. to use FD input…
The main objective of the present project is to explore the viability of an adaptive optics control system based exclusively on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), making strong use of their parallel processing capability. In an…
The Magellan Adaptive Secondary AO system, scheduled for first light in the fall of 2011, will be able to simultaneously perform diffraction limited AO science in both the mid-IR, using the BLINC/MIRAC4 10\{mu}m camera, and in the visible…
We theoretically analyze the quantum noise of signal-recycled laser interferometric gravitational-wave detectors with additional input and output optics, namely frequency-dependent squeezing of the vacuum entering the dark port and…
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 advent of extremely large telescopes will bring unprecedented light-collecting power and spatial resolution, but it will also lead to a significant increase in the size and complexity of focal-plane instruments. The use of freeform…
Three mode parametric instability has been predicted in Advanced gravitational wave detectors. Here we present the first observation of this phenomenon in a large scale suspended optical cavity designed to be comparable to those of advanced…
The Standard Quantum Limit in continuous monitoring of a system is given by the trade-off of shot noise and back-action noise. In gravitational-wave detectors, such as Advanced LIGO, both contributions can simultaneously be squeezed in a…
Advances in micro deformable mirror (DM) technologies such as MEMs, have stimulated interest in the characteristics of systems that include a high stroke mirror in series with a high actuator count mirror. This arrangement is referred to as…
The influence of a deformable mirror on spatial light modulation in ultrafast lasers processing is demonstrated. The deformable mirror was integrated into an optical setup which contains an additional lens for generating a nearly linear…
The LIGO-II gravitational-wave interferometers (ca. 2006--2008) are designed to have sensitivities at about the standard quantum limit (SQL) near 100 Hz. This paper describes and analyzes possible designs for subsequent, LIGO-III…
The two interferometers of the Laser Interferometry Gravitaional-wave Observatory (LIGO) recently detected gravitational waves from the mergers of binary black hole systems. Accurate calibration of the output of these detectors was crucial…
This paper presents the design and technical progress of a precision X-Y stage for detector dithering and flexure compensation. The stage is being developed for use in the Magellan InfraRed Multi-Object Spectrograph, MIRMOS. MIRMOS is a…
Modal noise appears due to the non-uniform and unstable distribution of light intensity among the finite number of modes in multimode fibres. It is an important limiting factor in measuring radial velocity precisely by fibre-fed…
The goal of the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is to detect and study gravitational waves of astrophysical origin. Direct detection of gravitational waves holds the promise of testing general relativity in the…
We present a new kind of varifocal mirror with independently adjustable curvatures in the major directions. For actuation we use two stacked piezo bending actuators with crossed in-plane polarization. This mirror can be used for example as…