The response of laser interferometers to a gravitational wave

Abstract

Laser interferometer detectors are now widely used in an attempt to detect gravitational waves (gw). The interaction of the gw with the light circulating in the interferometer is usually explained in terms of the motion of the "free" mirrors that form the interferometer arms. It is however instructive to show that the same result can be obtained by simply calculating the propagation of an electromagnetic plane wave between "free mirrors" in the curved space-time induced by the gw. One finds that the plane wave acquires frequency modulation sidebands at the gw frequency, as would be expected from the absorption and emission of gravitons from and to the gw. Such sidebands are completely equivalent to the time-dependent phase shift imposed on the plane wave, that follows from the conventional calculation.

References in corpus (3)

• The Response of Test Masses to Gravitational Waves in the Coordinates of a Local Observer
• On the round-trip time for a photon propagating in the field of a plane gravitational wave
• Interaction of plane gravitational waves with a Fabry-Perot cavity in the local Lorentz frame

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Graviton detection and the quantization of gravity
• Gravitational waves physics using Fermi coordinates: a new teaching perspective
• The Electromagnetic Field in Gravitational Wave Interferometers
• Detecting gravitational waves with light
• The Response of Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors Beyond the Eikonal Equation
• Geometrical vs wave optics under gravitational waves