Prospects for High-Frequency Gravitational-Wave Detection with GEO600

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of GEO600 to detect high-frequency gravitational waves by adjusting its signal-recycling detuning, analyzing its sensitivity in the kilohertz range and comparing it with other detectors.

Contribution

It demonstrates that simple modifications to GEO600 can enable high-frequency GW detection, a capability not shared by LIGO without significant optical changes.

Findings

GEO600's sensitivity can be enhanced in the 3-10 kHz range through detuning.

LIGO cannot achieve similar high-frequency sensitivity without optical modifications.

GEO600 shows promising sensitivity to proposed high-frequency GW sources.

Abstract

Current ground-based interferometers are optimized for sensitivity from a few tens of Hz to about 1 kHz. While they are not currently utilized for GW detection, interferometric detectors also feature narrow bands of strong sensitivity at higher frequencies where the sideband fields created by a GW are resonantly amplified in the optical system. Small changes to system parameters allow the narrow band of high sensitivity to be scanned over a much larger range of frequencies. In this paper, we investigate whether simply modifying the detuning angle of the signal-recycling mirror of the GEO600 interferometer can make this experiment sensitive to GWs in the kilohertz frequency range. We compute the strain sensitivity for GEO600 across a frequency range from several kHz to tens of kHz for various detuning angles. We also show that LIGO cannot attain the same effect assuming that the optical components are not changed due to the narrow band response of the Fabry-Perot cavities. We then calculate the sensitivity of GEO600 to various proposed high-frequency GW sources and compare it to the sensitivity of other ground-based detectors.