Let us, for the time being, imagine that we are capable of measuring an electromagnetic (e.g., light)
wave-phase shift with respect to some coherent reference of the same frequency. Having such a
hypothetical tool, what would be the right way to use it, if one had a task to measure some tiny classical
force? The simplest device one immediately conjures up is the one drawn in Figure 1
. It consists of a
movable totally-reflective mirror with mass
and a coherent paraxial light beam, that impinges
on the mirror and then gets reflected towards our hypothetical phase-sensitive device. The
mirror acts as a probe for an external force
that one seeks to measure. The response of the
mirror on the external force
depends upon the details of its dynamics. For definiteness, let
the mirror be a harmonic oscillator with mechanical eigenfrequency
. Then the
mechanical equation of motion gives a connection between the mirror displacement
and the
external force
in the very familiar form of the harmonic oscillator equation of motion:
Apparently, the information about the signal force can be obtained from the measured phase
shift by post-processing of the measurement data record
by substituting it into Eq. (1
)
instead of
. Thus, the estimate of the signal force
reads:
Above, we assumed a direct light phase measurement with a hypothetical device in order to detect a weak external force, possibly created by a GW. However, in reality, direct phase measurement are not so easy to realize at optical frequencies. At the same time, physicists know well how to measure light intensity (amplitude) with very high precision using different kinds of photodetectors ranging from ancient–yet–die-hard reliable photographic plates to superconductive photodetectors capable of registering individual photons [67]. How can one transform the signal, residing in the outgoing light phase, into amplitude or intensity variation? This question is rhetorical for physicists, for interference of light as well as the multitude of interferometers of various design and purpose have become common knowledge since a couple of centuries ago. Indeed, the amplitude of the superposition of two coherent waves depends on the relative phase of these two waves, thus transforming phase variation into the variation of the light amplitude.
For the detection of GWs, the most popular design is the Michelson interferometer [15, 12, 59
],
which schematic view is presented in Figure 2
. Let us briefly discuss how it works. Here, the
light wave from a laser source gets split by a semi-transparent mirror, called a beamsplitter,
into two waves with equal amplitudes, travelling towards two highly-reflective mirrors
1
to get reflected off them, and then recombine at the beamsplitter. The readout is performed by a
photodetector, placed in the signal port. The interferometer is usually tuned in such a way as to operate at
a dark fringe, which means that by default the lengths of the arms are taken so that the optical paths
for light, propagating back and forth in both arms, are equal to each other, and when they
recombine at the signal port, they interfere destructively, leaving the photodetector unilluminated.
On the opposite, the two waves coming back towards the laser, interfere constructively. The
situation changes if the end mirrors get displaced by some external force in a differential manner,
i.e., such that the difference of the arms lengths is non-zero:
. Let a laser
send to the interferometer a monochromatic wave that, at the beamsplitter, can be written
as
Let us see how a Michelson interferometer interacts with the GW. For this purpose we need to understand,
on a very basic level, what a GW is. Following the poetic, yet precise, definition by Kip Thorne,
‘gravitational waves are ripples in the curvature of spacetime that are emitted by violent astrophysical
events, and that propagate out from their source with the speed of light’ [13, 110]. A weak GW far away
from its birthplace can be most easily understood from analyzing its action on the probe bodies
motion in some region of spacetime. Usually, the deformation of a circular ring of free test
particles is considered (see Chapter 26: Section 26.3.2 of [13] for more rigorous treatment)
when a GW impinges it along the
-direction, perpendicular to the plane where the test
particles are located. Each particle, having plane coordinates
with respect to the center of
the ring, undergoes displacement
from its position at rest, induced by GWs:
For our Michelson interferometer, one can consider the end mirrors to be those test particles that lie on
a circular ring with beamsplitter located in its center. One can choose arms directions to coincide with
the frame and
axes, then the mirrors will have coordinates
and
,
correspondingly. For this case, the action of the GW field on the mirrors is featured in Figure 3
. It is
evident from this picture and from the above formulas that an
-polarized component of
the GW does not change the relative lengths of the Michelson interferometer arms and thus
does not contribute to its output signal; at the same time,
-polarized GWs act on the
end masses of the interferometer as a pair of tidal forces of the same value but opposite in
direction:
Assuming ,
, and
, one can write down the
equations of motion for the interferometer end mirrors that are now considered free (
)
as:
The foregoing conclusion can be understood in the following way: for GWs are inherently quadruple and, when the detector’s plane is orthogonal to the wave propagation direction, can only excite a differential mechanical motion of its mirrors, one can reduce a complicated dynamics of the interferometer probe masses to the dynamics of a single effective particle that is the differential motion of the mirrors in the arms. This useful observation appears to be invaluably helpful for calculation of the real complicated interferometer responses to GWs and also for estimation of its optical quantum noise, that comprises the rest of this review.
http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2012-5 |
Living Rev. Relativity 15, (2012), 5
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