A General Approach to Optomechanical Parametric Instabilities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a straightforward feedback model for optomechanical parametric instabilities, highlighting their significance in gravitational-wave detectors like Advanced LIGO and the potential risks they pose to stable high-power operation.

Contribution

It provides a general, simplified feedback framework applicable to various optical systems to analyze and understand parametric instabilities.

Findings

Parametric instabilities can threaten the stability of high-power optical systems.

The feedback description is applicable to a range of optical configurations.

Unaddressed instabilities could compromise gravitational-wave detector performance.

Abstract

We present a simple feedback description of parametric instabilities which can be applied to a variety of optical systems. Parametric instabilities are of particular interest to the field of gravitational-wave interferometry where high mechanical quality factors and a large amount of stored optical power have the potential for instability. In our use of Advanced LIGO as an example application, we find that parametric instabilities, if left unaddressed, present a potential threat to the stability of high-power operation.