Sensitivity of multipass and Fabry-Perot delay lines to small misalignments

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Large, ultrasensitive Michelson interferometers, containing a delay line in each arms, are being considered as a way of detecting gravitational radiation. The authors study the sensitivity of multipass and Fabry-Perot delay lines to misalignments and to a mismatch of the incoming light beam, in order to optimize and to compare both techniques. A perfectly reentrant multipass delay line, injected so as to get a circular spot pattern, is equivalent to a Fabry-Perot of the same geometry. The apparent length variation is then a quadratic function of the misalignment parameters. But a more realistic imperfectly reentrant multipass delay line shows a linear dependence; it is thus much more sensitive, so that the Fabry-Perot technique looks like a better choice in this respect.

This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit: