Active noise cancellation in a suspended interferometer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a feed-forward vibration isolation method using Wiener filtering and adaptive filtering techniques on a suspended interferometer, with potential applications in gravitational wave detection and other high-precision experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a practical noise cancellation approach combining Wiener and adaptive filtering for suspended interferometers, applicable to large-scale gravitational wave detectors.

Findings

Effective vibration suppression demonstrated

Comparison with theoretical estimates shows good agreement

Potential to improve sensitivity in gravitational wave observatories

Abstract

We demonstrate feed-forward vibration isolation on a suspended Fabry-Perot interferometer using Wiener filtering and a variant of the common Least Mean Square (LMS) adaptive filter algorithm. We compare the experimental results with theoretical estimates of the cancellation efficiency. Using data from the recent LIGO Science Run, we also estimate the impact of this technique on full scale gravitational wave interferometers. In the future, we expect to use this technique to also remove acoustic, magnetic, and gravitational noise perturbations from the LIGO interferometers. This noise cancellation technique is simple enough to implement in standard laboratory environments and can be used to improve SNR for a variety of high precision experiments.