Escape Time Characterization of Pendular Fabry-Perot

We show that an escape from the potential minimum of Fabry-Perot interferometers can be detected measuring the associated sudden change of reflectivity. We demonstrate that the loss of information that occurs retaining only the sequence of escapes, rather than the full trajectory, can be very mild and can lead to an effective method to reveal the noise intensity or the presence of a coherent signal

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.Comment: PREPRINT Metrology for Aerospace (MetroAeroSpace), 2014 IEEE Publication Year: 2014, Page(s): 468 - 47