The Response of Optical Fibres to Gravitational Waves

TL;DR

This paper calculates how optical fibre modes respond to low-frequency gravitational waves by solving Maxwell's equations perturbatively, providing explicit formulas for phase and polarization changes in single-mode fibres.

Contribution

It introduces a novel perturbative method to analyze optical fibre responses to gravitational waves, deriving explicit formulas for phase and polarization perturbations.

Findings

Explicit formulas for phase perturbations

Explicit formulas for polarization perturbations

Method applicable to single-mode fibres

Abstract

The response of optical fibre modes to plane gravitational waves of low frequency is computed. By solving perturbatively the Maxwell equations for step-index optical fibres in a gravitational wave background and implementing appropriate boundary conditions to describe single-mode fibres, explicit formulae for the perturbations of the phase and the polarisation of the fibre modes are obtained.