Phase-Modulated Standing Wave Interferometer

Standing-wave interferometer

An interferometric position sensor was developed using the concept of sampling a standing wave. Interference of a standing wave created in front of a plane mirror can be detected by thin, partly transparent sensors based on amorphous silicon. The optical thickness of the absorption layer is thinner than the wavelength l of the incident light. Detection of minima and maxima of the standing wave ...

A phase-modulated interferometer for high-precision spectroscopy

We present a novel spectroscopic method based on a phase-modulated interferometer which is suitable for the high-precision measurement of absorption and index of refraction profiles. A comparison with competing methods, that is with interferometry and FM spectroscopy, is given. The combination of these two methods, the phase-modulated interferometer, is shown to be best suited for experiments a...

Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory

We report on a search for gravitational wave bursts using data from the first science run of the LIGO detectors. We focus on bursts with durations ranging from 4 msec to 100 msec, and with significant power in the LIGO sensitivity band of 150 to 3000 Hz. We bound the rate for such detected bursts at less than 1.6 events per day at 90% confidence level. This result is interpreted in terms of the...

Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory

Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory

We propose a method for in situ measurement of the length of kilometer size Fabry-Perot cavities in laser gravitational wave detectors. The method is based on the vernier, which occurs naturally when the laser incident on the cavity has a sideband. By changing the length of the cavity over several wavelengths we obtain a set of carrier resonances alternating with sideband resonances. From the m...