2.2 Mesa and flat beams
We shall see in a following Section 8 that thermal noise is reduced by widening the beam on a mirror in
such a way that the fluctuations of the surface are significantly cancelled by averaging on the readout beam
cross section. A way of obtaining almost “flat” beam profiles was proposed by a Caltech team led by Thorne
and O’Shaughnessy [12, 33, 11]. To understand the proposal, we start from a fundamental mode
at its waist (
)
and we take the convolution product with the characteristic function of a centered disk
of radius
where
is a constant to be determined by normalization. This mode of construction allows one to
compute the propagated mode. Because
is a linear combination of modes, its propagated value is
nothing but the same combination of propagated elementary modes
so that the mode is defined at any abscissa
by
where
is the Rayleigh parameter,
and
. After some algebra,
the result being axisymmetric, this is equivalent to
Normalization is easier to compute in the Fourier space. We have, after the Plancherel theorem
Now, the Fourier transform of the mode is nothing but the product of the Fourier transform of the
elementary mode by the Fourier transform of the characteristic function of the disk. The Fourier transform
of the mode at
is
whereas the Fourier transform of the disk is
where
is a Bessel function. Thus, we have
where
and
are the modified Bessel functions. Therefore, we have
so that the normalized mode is simply
which is straightforward to numerically integrate, the function
having a
simply form. One sees that the intensity profile is flat at the waist, with sharp wings (depending on
the parameter
), and that the propagated mode is also almost flat. The beam’s intensity
profile (see Figure 3) is similar to a flat bump with rather sharp edges, so that the beam was
called “mesa” by the previously mentioned Caltech team. The same mode propagated over
kilometer-long distances exhibits a very weak distortion of its intensity profile despite diffraction. In
foregoing numerical examples, we shall assume a symmetric cavity having a pair of identical
mirrors matched to that kind of mode. The wavefront at 1.5 km from the waist in a 3 km long
cavity determines the mirror’s shape (see Figure 4). This particular construction scheme gives a
nearly flat mirror, apart from a small departure. This kind of mirror has been tested for the
issues of angular alignment requirements and not found satisfactory [35
]; this is why a new
version has been proposed starting from spherical wave fronts in a nearly concentric cavity
geometry. There is a duality relation, found by Savov et al. [35], which allows one to map the
properties of this kind of beam to that of a “mesa” beam. In particular the intensity profile is
identical on the mirror coating, so that the analysis we propose here is valid for the mesa beam
model presented above and for the “nearly concentric cavity mode” as well (see Equation (16)
in [3]).
We choose the parameters
and
in order to have 1 ppm clipping losses. It is possible to reduce
clipping losses either by a smaller
or by a smaller
. However, reducing
too much leads
to distorted wavefronts and unfeasible mirrors. We have found a possible compromise with
= 3.2 cm and
= 10.7 cm, giving exactly 1 ppm clipping losses on both 35 cm diameter
mirrors.
For most of our purposes regarding thermal problems, a crude model (flat), reduced to the characteristic
function of the disk, namely an intensity function of the form
is sufficient. However, if need be, we will check that the conclusions drawn from the crude model (flat) are
still valid for the realistic model (mesa), defined by Equation (2.16). However, in some specific cases (e.g.,
thermodynamical noise), the crude model leads to mathematical problems and cannot be used at
all; thus, we must work with Equation (2.16). The value of
is chosen such that the flat
beam gives the darkest fringe when interfering with the mesa beam (minimizing the Hermitian
distance). This gives, for the mesa beam described above, an effective value b = 9.1 cm (see
Figure 3).
Throughout the following discussions, we shall numerically treat three examples. The first, “Ex1”, is the
current situation for the Virgo input mirrors, i.e., an
mode of w = 2 cm. The second, “Ex2”, is the
flat mode described above of b = 9.1 cm, or, when needed, the mesa mode with
= 10.7 cm (1 ppm
clipping loss). The third, “Ex3”, is the
mode of w = 3.5 cm (1 ppm clipping loss). However, the
analytic expressions are general.