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Published June 2003 | public
Journal Article Open

Model of thermal wave-front distortion in interferometric gravitational- wave detectors. I. Thermal focusing

Abstract

We develop a steady-state analytical and numerical model of the optical response of power-recycled Fabry-Perot Michelson laser gravitational-wave detectors to nonlinear thermal focusing in optical substrates. We assume that the thermal distortions are small enough that we can represent all intracavity fields as linear combinations of basis functions derived from the eigenmodes of a Fabry-Perot arm cavity. We have included the effects of power absorption in optical substrates and coatings, mismatches between laser wave-front and mirror surface curvatures, and aperture diffraction. We demonstrate a detailed numerical example of this model using the MATLAB program Melody for the initial Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory detector.

Additional Information

© 2003 Optical Society of America. Received December 2, 2002. We thank Ryan Lawrence for providing us with the finite-element software used to compute the temperature distributions in the LIGO beam splitter and for updated measurements of the emissivity and deta/dT of fused silica. We are grateful to the Center for Advanced Computing Research for providing the supercomputer facilities and the CPU time to execute our FFT codes. This work has been partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement PHY-9210038.

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August 22, 2023
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