Abstract
We develop a steady-state analytical and numerical model of the optical response of power-recycled Fabry–Perot Michelson laser gravitational-wave detectors to nonlinear thermal focusing in optical substrates. We assume that the thermal distortions are small enough that we can represent all intracavity fields as linear combinations of basis functions derived from the eigenmodes of a Fabry–Perot arm cavity. We have included the effects of power absorption in optical substrates and coatings, mismatches between laser wave-front and mirror surface curvatures, and aperture diffraction. We demonstrate a detailed numerical example of this model using the matlab program Melody for the initial Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory detector.
© 2003 Optical Society of America
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