Demonstration of optical spring in an un-detuned cavity containing an optical parametric amplifier

Abstract

Here we demonstrate the capacity to manipulate the optical spring (OS) effect by employing an optical parametric amplifier (OPA) within an optical cavity. We observed more than a factor of 2 increase in the OS frequency shift with the OPA. We also showed for the first time that the OS can be tuned by solely adjusting the OPA phase and showing an un-detuned cavity exhibiting an optical spring. The method can be applied to gravitational wave detectors in the signal recycling configuration to realize narrow bandwidth high sensitivity. The OS can be tuned to align the detector peak sensitivity frequency to known frequency continuous gravitational wave signals, dynamically tuned to track the gravitational wave signal from merging compact binaries or tuned to search for the post-merger signal of known binary coalescence.