Optical spring
Members
- Kentaro Komori
- Yuta Michimura
- Nobuyuki Matsumoto
- Yoichi Aso
- Masaki Ando
Overview
Radiation pressure of laser light in an optical cavity acts on the mirror's mechanical motion as restoring force when the cavity is detuning. This effect is called optical spring. It's useful for improving sensitivity of gravitational detectors and for research of opto-mechanics. The optical spring has potential to beat SQL in the detector sensitivity and to give light on macroscopic quantum mechanics.
Current status
In Ando group the optical spring effect is developed with a 5 mg mirror consisting of a triangle cavity. We have succeeded in increasing the resonant frequency of the pendulum mode from 2 Hz up to 1 kHz and cooling the mode to 15 mK.
