Related papers: Birefringence in a Silicon Beamsplitter at 2um for…
Crystalline materials are promising candidates as substrates or high-reflective coatings of mirrors to reduce thermal noises in future laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors. However, birefringence of such materials could…
Crystalline silicon has been proposed as a new test mass material in third generation gravitational wave detectors such as the Einstein Telescope (ET). Birefringence can reduce the interferometric contrast and can produce dynamical…
Einstein Telescope (ET) is expected to achieve sensitivity improvements exceeding an order of magnitude compared to current gravitational-wave detectors. The rigorous characterization in optical birefringence of materials and coatings has…
AlGaAs/GaAs coatings are being considered as coating candidates for gravitational-wave detectors. In this paper we investigate the birefringence properties of this crystalline semiconductor material by modulating the optical illumination on…
Although current amorphous high-reflective mirror coatings have had tremendous success in metrology applications, they are inherently limited by thermal fluctuations in their coating structure. Alternatively, crystalline coating technology…
Cooling down test masses to cryogenic temperatures is a way to reduce the thermal noise of gravitational wave detectors. Crystalline materials are considered the most promising materials for fabricating cryogenic test masses and their…
Gravitational waves would attain birefringence during their propagation from distant sources to the Earth, when the CPT symmetry is broken. If it was sizeable enough, such birefringence could be measured by the Advanced LIGO, Virgo and…
In this paper we present a review of the existing data on interferential mirror birefringence. We also report new measurements of two sets of mirrors that confirm that mirror phase retardation per reflection decreases when mirror…
We report the performance of a silicon wafer beamsplitter for use for low $\Delta\nu>0.3 cm^{-1}$ resolution Fourier transform spectroscopy at far infrared frequencies. We characterize the Si beamsplitter by comparing throughput spectra…
The propagation of gravitational waves can reveal fundamental features of the structure of spacetime. For instance, differences in the propagation of gravitational-wave polarizations would be a smoking gun for parity violations in the…
A polarised light imaging microscopy with an addition of liquid crystal (LC) phase retarder was implemented to determine the birefringence of silk fibers with the high 2 micrometers spatial resolution. The measurement was carried out with…
The power spectrum of cosmic microwave background lensing is a powerful tool for constraining fundamental physics such as the sum of neutrino masses and the dark energy equation of state. Current lensing measurements primarily come from…
Hollow-core fibers have demonstrated record performance in applications such as high-power pulse delivery, quantum computing, and sensing. However, their routine use is yet to become reality. A major obstacle is the ability to maintain the…
We developed a method to measure the phase retardation and birefringence of muscovite mica plate in the temperature range of 223K to 358K within the spectrum of 300 to 700 nm. The phase retardation data is gained through the standard…
The thermo-mechanical properties of silicon make it of significant interest as a possible material for mirror substrates and suspension elements for future long-baseline gravitational wave detectors. The mechanical dissipation in 92um thick…
Using a custom-built scanning system, we generated maps of birefringence on reflection at $\lambda=1064$~nm from single-crystal GaAs/Al$_{0.92}$Ga$_{0.08}$As Bragg reflectors (henceforth ``AlGaAs coatings''). Ten coatings were bonded to…
Birefringence ($\Delta n$) is the dependence of the refractive index of a material on the polarization of light travelling through it. Birefringent materials are used as polarizers, waveplates, and for novel light-matter coupling. While…
We present an in-situ method to measure the birefringence of a single vacuum window by means of microwave spectroscopy on an ensemble of cold atoms. Stress-induced birefringence can cause an ellipticity in the polarization of an initially…
The absorption length, $\lambda_{abs}$, of light with wavelengths between 0.95 and 1.30$~\mu$m in silicon irradiated with 24$~$GeV/c protons to 1$~$MeV neutron equivalent fluences between 0 and $8.6 \times 10^{15}~$cm$^{-2}$ has been…
Optical-window birefringence is frequently a major obstacle in experiments measuring changes in the polarization state of light traversing a sample under investigation. It can contribute a signal indistinguishable from that due to the…