Building a 3.5 m prototype interferometer for the Q & A vacuum birefringence experiment and high precision ellipsometry

Abstract

We have built and tested a 3.5 m high-finesse Fabry-Perot prototype inteferometer with a precision ellipsometer for the QED test and axion search (Q & A) experiment. We use X-pendulum-double-pendulum suspension designs and automatic control schemes developed by the gravitational-wave detection community. Verdet constant and Cotton-Mouton constant of the air are measured as a test. Double modulation with polarization modulation 100 Hz and magnetic-field modulation 0.05 Hz gives 10^{-7} rad phase noise for a 44-minute integration.

This draft has been presented in the 5th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Nonlinear collective effects in photon-photon and photon-plasma interactions
• Q & A Experiment to Search for Vacuum Dichroism, Pseudoscalar-Photon Interaction and Millicharged Fermions
• Axion Search with Q & A Experiment
• Measurement of the Cotton-Mouton effect in nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, and krypton with the Q & A apparatus
• Polarimetry for measuring the vacuum magnetic birefringence with quasi-static fields: a systematics study for the VMB@CERN experiment
• Suspension of the fiber mode-cleaner launcher and measurement of the high extinction-ratio (10^{-9}) ellipsometer for the Q & A experiment
• Ellipsometry noise spectrum, suspension transfer function measurement and closed-loop control of the suspension system in the Q & A experiment