The picture to the right is one of the LIGO interferometers.
Physics and Mathematical Physics , Adelaide University
| One of the most important endeavours of 21st century physics is to detect gravitational radiation, and in so doing open a new astronomical window on the universe. The Optics group at Adelaide is part of the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy ACIGA and collaborates with many of the international large-scale interferometric detector projects ( TAMA (Japan), VIRGO (France/Italy), GEO (Germany/UK) and LIGO (USA)). | ||
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Our main contribution is the development of high power lasers and
techniques for high optical power interferometry
for the US Advanced LIGO detectors. These lasers are not particularly
powerful from the point of view of pulsed lasers for materials
processing but their combination of CW power (~150W), mode quality and
stability is unprecedented.
The picture to the right is one of the LIGO interferometers. |
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This photo shows the slab and the totally internally reflected path of the beam inside it. |
Our approach is a Nd:YAG laser (1064nm wavelength) with the laser
medium in the form of a slab, pumped (i.e. excited) from the side
by diode laser light that is brought up to the slab with fibres.
The innovative features of our design are management of the waste heat so that temperature gradients in the crystal don't cause excessive thermal lensing, and a stable/unstable cavity design. We use a two stage injection locking scheme to transfer the stability of a low power laser (the master oscillator) to our high power device (the slave). |
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| The neodymium laser is pumped by diode laser light. This thumbnail shows the diode pump lasers in an earlier incarnation (only 80W pump power). Click on it to see the 520W rack of diode lasers that we are currently working with, (and Martin Ostermeyer doing up a nut). (60k) |
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Power scalable TEM00 cw Nd:YAG laser with thermal lens
control D.Mudge, M.O.Ostermeyer, P.J.Veitch, J. Munch, B.Middlemiss, D.J.Ottaway and M.W.Hamilton IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics 6, 643-649 (2000) (pdf) copyright IEEE |
Not all of the pump light is actually converted into laser light and this means that there is waste heat generated in the slab. As this flows out, a non-uniform temperature distribution is created. The refractive index of the crystal is temperature dependent, so the temperature distribution causes unwanted prismatic and lensing effects. To control the temperature distribution we cool the slab from the sides (the same sides as the pump light enters) and inject extra heat from the top and bottom. This makes the temperature distribution in the vertical axis uniform, at least over the volume occupied by the laser beam. The zig-zag path of the light in the horizontal direction, a function of the slab geometry, averages out the effect of temperature gradients in that direction. We have demonstrated that this works! |
| Because we control the temperature gradients in the vertical axis, but not the horizontal, we separate the design of the horizontal and vertical sections of the laser cavity (i.e. the mirror arrangement that provides feedback of the laser light to the crystal). In the horizontal we have a fairly standard stable cavity design, with natural apertures in the cavity giving mode discrminiation. The cavity in the vertical direction is unstable, with magnification of the beam within the cavity and a graded reflectivity output mirror. We have demonstrated that this works too! |
Click on thumbnail to see slide showing temperature gradient control of stable/unstable operation. |
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Stable cavity: the focussing of the light by the cavity mirrors
ensures that there are ray paths which do not wander out of the
cavity.
Unstable cavity: ray paths are allowed to wander out of the cavity, and this loss from the cavity is the output light. The advantage of an unstable cavity is that the laser beam inside the cavity can be broader and make better use of the pumped laser medium.
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| The injection locking scheme is a two stage arrangement because our stable low power laser (200mW) doesn't have enough output power to reliably enslave the frequency of the high power laser on its own. At an earlier stage of this project we demonstrated that we can use this low power laser to stabilise a medium power laser (5W). This process added negligible extra noise, so the stability of the low power laser really does govern the overall stability. (Stabilising low power lasers directly is much easier than with high power ones.) The medium power laser will then be used as the master oscillator for the high power system. |
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Frequency and intensity noise of an injection locked Nd:YAG ring laser
D.J.Ottaway, P.J.Veitch, C. Hollitt, D.Mudge, M.W.Hamilton and J. Munch, Applied Physics B 71, 163-169 (2000) (pdf) copyright Springer |
We have shown that both injection locking stages work independently and have shown that the injection locking process adds neglible noise to the system. So the frequency noise of the slave is really just that of the master oscillator. |