Statistical physics IV

PHYS-436

Explain briefly how LIGO is used to detect gravita...

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Description

  • Explain briefly how LIGO is used to detect gravitational waves
  • What are the possible noise sources in an interferometer?
  • What is the normal mode analysis and when does it fail? How does the normal mode analysis allow one to compute the noise?
  • Explain the physical origin of various dissipations in a mechanical resonator, and how do they model them?
  • Explain the difference between the scaling of the bulk damping and the surface damping
  • Imagine, you have software that can simulate elastic behavior of a solid body (e.g. the mirror in question) and can also find its mechanical eigenmodes. How would you use this software to compute the noise induced on the phase of a laser beam reflected from this mirror? Outline the two approaches mentioned in the paper.