Wavefront Sensing with a Coupled Cavity for Torsion-Bar Antenna

Abstract

Torsion-Bar Antenna (TOBA) is a ground-based gravitational wave detector using torsion pendulums. TOBA can detect intermediate-mass black hole binary mergers, gravitational wave stochastic background, and Newtonian noise, and is useful for earthquake early warning. A prototype detector Phase-III TOBA with 35 cm-scale pendulums is under development to demonstrate noise reduction. The target strain sensitivity is set to 1 × 10 −15 / √ Hz between 0.1 Hz-10 Hz. A new scheme of wavefront sensing with a coupled cavity was proposed to measure the pendulum rotation as low as 5 × 10 −16 rad/ √ Hz for Phase-III TOBA. In our method, an auxiliary cavity is used to enhance the first-order Hermite-Gaussian mode in a main cavity. Experimental demonstration is ongoing to confirm the feasibility of angular signal amplification and establish a method for locking a coupled cavity. We evaluated the performance of the coupled cavity and concluded that angular signal amplification would be feasible with this sensor. The coupled cavity was successfully locked to the resonance by the Pound-Drever-Hall technique with two modulation frequencies.