Session J9 - Experimental Gravity and Gravitational Radiation.
FOCUS session, Sunday afternoon, April 29
Room 2, Renaissance Hotel
Interferometric gravitational wave detectors, such as LIGO, use mirrors suspended in pendulums. The current LIGO dectors use simple pendulums, but advanced LIGO detectors will use multiple pendulums with some stages on soft vertical springs. A drawback of the a multiple pendulum design is that it is difficult to model and predict cross couplings from one vibrational mode to another due to slight unavoidable asymmetries in the real system. Of most concern are the couplings to motion along the optical axis and into angular motions, which have the most potential to contaminate data.
Our research focuses on the experimental testing of the pendulum designs for cross couplings with a special dedicated shaking stage. The cross couplings in each degree of freedom, their isolation and damping are investigated in this research though the measurement of transfer functions as filtered though the suspension system.
This research is supported by The Pennsylvania State University, the NSF Grant no. PHY-9870032, and the REU program at The Pennsylvania State University.