Hannover 2013 – scientific programme

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 51: Precision measurements and metrology VI (with Q)

A 51.7: Talk

Friday, March 22, 2013, 15:30–15:45, E 001

Control of optical cavities in light-shining-through-a-wall experiments — •Robin Baehre — Max-Planck-Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert-Einstein-Institute), Callinstr. 38, 30167 Hannover, Germany

Light-shining-through-a-wall (LSW) experiments are a straight-forward approach to laboratory searches for weakly interacting sub-eV particles (WISPs), which are considered as a viable candidate for cold dark matter. WISPs, which exhibit coupling to a photon field, can be produced from a laser beam, which is shone on a solid wall. Due to their weak coupling to ordinary matter, WISPs can transverse the wall, which is opaque to photons, and can reconvert into photons afterwards and consequently be detected by a photon detector. LSW experiments often suffer from the fact that WISP fluxes produced in the laboratory are much smaller than those from astronomical sources. However, LSW searches can be considerably improved by fully exploiting the benefits of using coherent laser light to the production and regeneration process. Using optical resonators on the production and regeneration side helps to probe for very small WISP-photon couplings and to explore the parameter space that can be deduced from observations of anomalous white dwarf cooling and transparency of the universe to TeV photons. I will focus my tak on the optical design of ALPS-II with the implementation of production and regeneration resonator and explain how the demanding requirements on spatial and spectral stability can be fulfilled by application of optical precision measurement and control with picometer accuracy.