|
The 10m prototype interferometer is a test bed for new technologies of future laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors. Construction of a 10m arm length prototype interferometer in a UHV vacuum system has started three years ago. The infrastructure work is now complete, the electrics installation is finished, the lab is equipped with optical tables and the control room for the digital control and data system is nearly completed. The full pumping infrastructure and the large scale UHV system has been delivered and installed and is now fully operational with a base pressure in the 10-8 mbar range.
The vacuum tanks will be equipped with soft passive tables for seismic isolation. They are based on inverted pendulum legs and geometric anti-spring filters to achieve more than 80db of seismic isolation. Installation of the tables has started. The vibration isolation tables will be inter-connected by a suspension point interferometer (SPI) providing active feedback to form effectively one large rigid platform. The SPI will be based on an Iodine stabilized Nd:YAG laser and a custom phase meter, based on the LISA Pathfinder design.
The first major experiment to go into the prototype interferometer is a sub - standard quantum limit interferometer. Design proceeded substantially in 2008, was finalized in 2009, and is based on an arm cavity Michelson interferometer with Khalili cavities in the arms to suppress thermal noise. Construction is proceeding.
|
Top