Related papers: Finding the Maximal Contrast of Two Elliptical Gau…
A typical application for laser interferometers is a precision measurement of length changes that result in interferometric phase shifts. Such phase changes are typically predicted numerically, due to the com- plexity of the overlap…
Ellipsometry is a powerful and well-established optical technique used in the characterisation of materials. It works by combining the components of elliptically polarized light in order to draw information about the optical system. We…
Optical interferometers increasingly use single-mode fibers as spatial filters to convert varying wavefront distortion into intensity fluctuations which can be monitored for accurate calibration of fringe amplitudes. Here I propose using an…
Observations at mas-resolution scales and high dynamic range hold a central place in achieving, for instance, the spectroscopic characterization of exo-Earths or the detailed mapping of their protoplanetary disc birthplace. Ground or…
Gaussian aperture pupil masks (GAPMs) can in theory achieve the contrast requisite for directly imaging an extrasolar planet around a nearby solar type star. We outline the process of designing, fabricating, and testing a GAPM for use on…
In the context of simulating precision laser interferometers, we compare via several examples two wavefront decomposition methods: the Mode Expansion Method (MEM) and the Gaussian beam decomposition (GBD) for their precision and…
Cold-atom interferometers commonly face systematic effects originating from the coupling between the trajectory of the atomic wave packet and the wave front of the laser beams driving the interferometer. Detrimental for the accuracy and the…
Gaussian aperture pupil masks (GAPMs) can in theory achieve the contrast requisite for directly imaging an extrasolar planet. We outline the process of fabricating and testing a GAPM for use on the Penn State near-IR Imager and Spectrograph…
We investigate interferometric techniques to estimate the deflection angle of an optical beam and compare them to the direct detection of the beam deflection. We show that quantum metrology methods lead to a unifying treatment for both…
Correcting astigmatism and ellipticity in laser beams is critical for improving performance in many applications like microscopy, atomic physics, quantum information processing, and advanced manufacturing. Passive correction methods based…
Top sensitivity Ring Laser Gyroscopes based on a simple mechanical scheme, so called heterolithic, have shown to operate on a continuous basis; since the mirror positions are not fixed, unwanted signals can occur, and data selection is…
Suitable shaping (in particular, flattening and broadening) of the laser beam has recently been proposed as an effective device to reduce internal (mirror) thermal noise in advanced gravitational wave interferometric detectors. Based on…
Placing a pupil mask with a gaussian aperture into the optical train of current telescopes represents a way to attain high contrast imaging that potentially improves contrast by orders of magnitude compared to current techniques. We present…
Interferometric photon-correlation measurements, which correspond to the second-order intensity cross-correlations between the two output ports of an unbalanced Michelson interferometer, are sensitive to both amplitude and phase…
The Gaussian beam superposition method is an asymptotic method for computing high frequency wave fields in smoothly varying inhomogeneous media. In this paper we study the accuracy of the Gaussian beam superposition method and derive error…
We report an upper bound on the strain amplitude of gravitational wave bursts in a waveband from around 800Hz to 1.25kHz. In an effective coincident observing period of 62 hours, the prototype laser interferometric gravitational wave…
We observed two-photon phase super-resolution in an unbalanced Michelson interferometer with classical Gaussian laser pulses. Our work is a time-reversed version of a two-photon interference experiment using an unbalanced Michelson…
We report a new configuration and theoretical approach for the study of the incoherent and coherent combination of Gaussian laser beams which allows us to calculate the combined intensity at every point in space, this new approach consists…
We propose a precise ellipsometric method for the investigation of coherent light with a small ellipticity. The main feature of this method is the use of compensators with phase delays providing the maximum accuracy of measurements for the…
A fundamental limit to the sensitivity of optical interferometers is imposed by Brownian thermal fluctuations of the mirrors' surfaces. This thermal noise can be reduced by using larger beams which "average out" the random fluctuations of…