To the practical design of the optical lever intracavity topology of gravitational-wave detectors

TL;DR

This paper proposes a practical improvement to the optical lever intracavity topology for gravitational-wave detectors, enhancing sensitivity and suppressing input light fluctuations, with analysis of local meter schemes and their limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a more practical symmetric optical lever scheme and analyzes local meter variants, highlighting potential for improved quantum nondemolition measurements.

Findings

Symmetric scheme suppresses input light fluctuation influence.

Ideal spectral variation measurement offers best sensitivity.

Discrete Sampling Variation Measurement is more practical but less sensitive.

Abstract

The QND intracavity topologies of gravitational-wave detectors proposed several years ago allow, in principle, to obtain sensitivity significantly better than the Standard Quantum Limit using relatively small anount of optical pumping power. In this article we consider an improved more ``practical'' version of the optical lever intracavity scheme. It differs from the original version by the symmetry which allows to suppress influence of the input light amplitude fluctuation. In addition, it provides the means to inject optical pumping inside the scheme without increase of optical losses. We consider also sensitivity limitations imposed by the local meter which is the key element of the intracavity topologies. Two variants of the local meter are analyzed, which are based on the spectral variation measurement and on the Discrete Sampling Variation Measurement, correspondingly. The former one, while can not be considered as a candidate for a practical implementation, allows, in principle, to obtain the best sensitivity and thus can be considered as an ideal ``asymptotic case'' for all other schemes. The DSVM-based local meter can be considered as a realistic scheme but its sensitivity, unfortunately, is by far not so good just due to a couple of peculiar numeric factors specific for this scheme. From our point of view search of new methods of mechanical QND measurements probably based on improved DSVM scheme or which combine the local meter with the pondermotive squeezing technique, is necessary.