Analysis and suppression of thermal effect of an ultra-stable laser interferometer for space-based gravitational waves detection

Abstract

In this paper, we present a suppression method for the thermal drift of an ultra-stable laser interferometer. The detailed analysis on the Michelson interferometer indicates that the change in optical path length induced by temperature variation can be effectively reduced by choosing proper thickness and/or incident angle of a compensator. Taking the optical bench of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna Pathfinder as an example, we analyze the optical bench model with a compensator and show that the temperature coefficient of this laser interferometer can be reduced down to 1 pm/K with an incident angle of 0.267828 rad. The method presented in this paper can be used in the design of ultra-stable laser interferometers, especially for space-based gravitational waves detection.