Adaptive Optics for Advanced Gravitational Wave Detectors

This project will create a full scale facility for testing optical aberration correction schemes for the world'sgravitational wave detectors. The optical surfaces in gravitational wave detectors must be controlled to the atomiclevel to limit the impact of quantum noise and maximize the sensitivity of these extraordinary instruments. The finetuning of optical surfaces is done using the so-called thermal compensation systems and currently theperformance of these systems can only be evaluated once they are installed on a gravitational wave detector.This is severely limiting the optimization of this critical sub-system and hence there is an urgent need for thisfacility because it will be the only one of its type anywhere on the globe.