Stabilized lasers for gravitational waves detection by interferometry

摘要

The detection of gravitational waves is certainly one of the most exciting scientific and technical challenges for the coming years, which sees the construction of kilometers antennas, the French-Italian Virgo near Pisa, and the two US LIGO antennas in Washington and Louisiana States, as well as hundred meters projects GEO and TAMA. The realisation of the laser source is one of the critical difficulties: to detect sub-nanoradian changes of the interferometric phase of these kilometric Michelson interferometers requires a very stable and high power laser. We will describe these stabilized lasers and give the performances achieved compared to their initial requirements for such applications.