Speaker
Prof.
Lee McCuller
(Caltech)
Description
Gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO require feedback control to maintain the simultaneous operating points of many resonant cavities within each interferometer observatory. The control of auxiliary degrees of freedom injects noise into its most sensitive channel used for gravitational-wave signals due to nonlinear couplings. This talk will overview the control challenges in reducing this noise and how we can transition from old to modern control methods. We are now able to produce probably optimal designs along a Pareto-front for our alignment systems that have noise shaped as 1/f^6 spanning 6 orders of magnitude over a half of our control bandwidth.