Authors: Cole Perkins, Kaden Loring, Mauricio Diaz-Ortiz, Ryan Goetz, Paul Fulda
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Paul Fulda
College: College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
In this project the methods of creating a Heterodyne Phase Camera (HPC) and its performance are explored. The HPC maps the spatial wave front of two interfering laser beams, which will allow the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to better characterize and optimize their lasers. The wave front of the beams is described by plots of the relative phase of a signal incident on a camera. These phase maps can be displayed real-time or processed offline for a more detailed analysis. Not only would a phase camera aid in the detection of gravitational waves but its generality lends to the HPC being useful in other experiments which require precision optical metrology.