Timeline for Sensitivity of Space Telescopes and Instruments
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 23, 2014 at 11:47 | comment | added | Selene Routley | @RossMillikan ... and very much feed off each other. | |
| Dec 23, 2014 at 11:47 | comment | added | Selene Routley | @RossMillikan .... lots of space, so you don't need to fold the beam up as you do in LIGO and the Einstein telescope. The experimental study of relativity has been the most amazing driver of interferometry technology over the last 20 years. LISA and LIGO and the ET seek the gravitational waves foretold by GTR, but equally impressive are the modern replications of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which measure $c$ and its non-dependence on inertial frame to within better than $\Delta c/c\leq 10^{-17}$. The technologies for the MME replication and gravitational wave sensing are highly related .. | |
| Dec 23, 2014 at 11:42 | comment | added | Selene Routley | @RossMillikan There is a great deal of technology in bridging that gap. Indeed, the Einstein Telescope Design Study Document summarizes this. Brute force signal to noise is one part of it: one uses powerful lasers with fantasically sophisticated noise control so that the measurement has huge dynamic range. The use of squeezed light to trade off amplitude accuracy for phase accuracy (a manifestation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Inequality) is a small, but significant part of it. I'm pretty sure LISA is to use only one pass - in space you have, well, .... | |
| May 22, 2014 at 18:15 | history | edited | Hobbes | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
corrected a wrong answer, provided more data
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| May 22, 2014 at 15:42 | comment | added | Ross Millikan | It is a long way from the naive 400 nm accuracy of an inteferometer to the 80 pm accuracy claimed. I'm sure that multiple passes are the first part of this, but it also takes very accurate measurement of the peaks. | |
| May 21, 2014 at 10:19 | comment | added | Hobbes | Not necessarily. | |
| May 21, 2014 at 9:43 | comment | added | Phizzy | Are the two resulting beams perpendicular to one another in that case? | |
| May 21, 2014 at 7:46 | history | answered | Hobbes | CC BY-SA 3.0 |