by Michael Tröbs.

Michael Tröbs in the lab. Michael Tröbs is an experimental physicist at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (AEI). The LISA optical bench test bed was built in collaboration with Airbus DS and University of Glasgow. At AEI Michael is responsible for the project.

A testbed to experimentally investigate tilt-to-length coupling for LISA, a gravitational-wave detector in space.

The planned space-based gravitational-wave detector LISA will consist of three satellites in a triangle with million kilometer long laser arms. This constellation will orbit the Sun, following the Earth. LISA is expected to be laser shot-noise limited in its most sensitive frequency band (in the Millihertz range). The second largest contribution to the noise budget is the coupling from laser beam tilt to the interferometric length measurement, which we will call tilt-to-length (TTL) coupling in the following.

How does tilt-to-length coupling come about? Continue reading →