Paper detail

Noise Estimate of Pendular Fabry-Perot through Reflectivity Change

A key issue in developing pendular Fabry-Perot interferometers as very accurate displacement measurement devices, is the noise level. The Fabry-Perot pendulums are the most promising device to detect gravitational waves, and therefore the background and the internal noise should be accurately measured and reduced. In fact terminal masses generates additional internal noise mainly due to thermal fluctuations and vibrations. We propose to exploit the reflectivity change, that occurs in some special points, to monitor the pendulums free oscillations and possibly estimate the noise level. We find that in spite of long transients, it is an effective method for noise estimate. We also prove that to only retain the sequence of escapes, rather than the whole time dependent dynamics, entails the main characteristics of the phenomenon. Escape times could also be relevant for future gravitational wave detector developments.