Stuttgart 2012 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 48: Laseranwendungen: opt. Messtechnik

Q 48.7: Talk

Thursday, March 15, 2012, 15:45–16:00, V38.01

Simulating and optimizing laser interferometers — •Evgenia Kochkina, Gudrun Wanner, Christoph Mahrdt, Sönke Schuster, Michael Tröbs, Gerhard Heinzel, and Karsten Danzmann — AEI Hannover, Germany

Designing complicated optical systems often requires simulations to create the most efficient setup. There are dozens of optical software tools available, but to the author's knowledge none of them incapsulates all of the subsequent features:

- tracing different types of Gaussian beams (simple and general astigmatic Gaussian beams or Hermite modes) through an arbitrary optical setup,

- heterodyne signal calculation (for instance longitudinal pathlength signal or differential wavefront sensing signal),

- optimizing interferometers in a given way.

On the other hand, most of the tools concentrate on classical optics effects, that might not be critical for laser interferometers. Therefore, we created a software tool called IfoCad specifically for the purpose of designing and investigating laser interferometers. During the talk we are going to give an overview of this program and it's real-life applications. We will present the models and algorithms we used to simulate simple astigmatic and general astigmatic Gaussian beams, Hermite modes, their tracing through complicated misaligned 3D systems, and optimizing interferometers to fulfill given requirements. We will also talk about heterodyne signals that we are using and the information that can be extracted from them.