The Advanced Virgo (AdV) detector is composed of different degrees of freedom (DOFs) i.e. Michelson interferometer, two Fabry-Perot arm cavities, signal recycling cavity, and power recycling cavity. ...These DOFs need to be locked to precise accuracy with robust, fast and reliable control systems. The control signals used to lock all the DOFs are mildly decoupled in frequency and the optical response of the DOFs are nonlinear, where the linear range of operation is just some percentage of the fringe for each DOF, thus posing difficulty in resonance lock at input laser wavelength for all the cavities. In particular, the control status of the arm cavities can alter the state of the detector's operational configuration. Using Auxiliary Lasers to lock the arm cavities at different wavelength offers flexible and robust lock of the detector and more spatial margin on the control signals. Second harmonic generation offers the most direct way to have laser beam with different wavelength and phase locked to the AdV input laser beam. We generated upto 97 mW of SH beam in single configuration at 532 nm using fibered amplified laser source at 1064 nm in a 10 mm long Poled Lithium Niobate crystal.
Current interferometric gravitational-wave detectors are limited by quantum noise over a wide range of their measurement bandwidth. One method to overcome the quantum limit is the injection of ...squeezed vacuum states of light into the interferometer's dark port. Here, we report on the successful application of this quantum technology to improve the shot noise limited sensitivity of the Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detector. A sensitivity enhancement of up to 3.2±0.1 dB beyond the shot noise limit is achieved. This nonclassical improvement corresponds to a 5%-8% increase of the binary neutron star horizon. The squeezing injection was fully automated and over the first 5 months of the third joint LIGO-Virgo observation run O3 squeezing was applied for more than 99% of the science time. During this period several gravitational-wave candidates have been recorded.
We perform a statistical standard siren analysis of GW170817. Our analysis does not utilize knowledge of NGC 4993 as the unique host galaxy of the optical counterpart to GW170817. Instead, we ...consider each galaxy within the GW170817 localization region as a potential host; combining the redshifts from all of the galaxies with the distance estimate from GW170817 provides an estimate of the Hubble constant, H0. Considering all galaxies brighter than as equally likely to host a binary neutron star merger, we find km s−1 Mpc−1 (maximum a posteriori and 68.3% highest density posterior interval; assuming a flat H0 prior in the range km s−1 Mpc−1). We explore the dependence of our results on the thresholds by which galaxies are included in our sample, and we show that weighting the host galaxies by stellar mass or star formation rate provides entirely consistent results with potentially tighter constraints. By applying the method to simulated gravitational-wave events and a realistic galaxy catalog we show that, because of the small localization volume, this statistical standard siren analysis of GW170817 provides an unusually informative (top 10%) constraint. Under optimistic assumptions for galaxy completeness and redshift uncertainty, we find that dark binary neutron star measurements of H0 will converge as , where N is the number of sources. While these statistical estimates are inferior to the value from the counterpart standard siren measurement utilizing NGC 4993 as the unique host, km s−1 Mpc−1 (determined from the same publicly available data), our analysis is a proof-of-principle demonstration of the statistical approach first proposed by Bernard Schutz over 30 yr ago.
The quantum radiation pressure and the quantum shot noise in laser-interferometric gravitational wave detectors constitute a macroscopic manifestation of the Heisenberg inequality. If quantum shot ...noise can be easily observed, the observation of quantum radiation pressure noise has been elusive, so far, due to the technical noise competing with quantum effects. Here, we discuss the evidence of quantum radiation pressure noise in the Advanced Virgo gravitational wave detector. In our experiment, we inject squeezed vacuum states of light into the interferometer in order to manipulate the quantum backaction on the 42 kg mirrors and observe the corresponding quantum noise driven displacement at frequencies between 30 and 70 Hz. The experimental data, obtained in various interferometer configurations, is tested against the Advanced Virgo detector quantum noise model which confirmed the measured magnitude of quantum radiation pressure noise.
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