Enhancing the sensitivity of interferometers with stable phase-insensitive quantum filters

Abstract

We present a new quantum control strategy for increasing the shot-noise-limited sensitivity of optical interferometers. The strategy utilizes active phase-insensitive quantum filtering of the signal inside the interferometer and does not rely on optical squeezing. On the example of the coupled-cavity resonators, employed in the gravitational-wave detectors, we show that fully causal and stable phase-insensitive filters can improve the interferometer sensitivity by more than an order of magnitude. The role of the phase-insensitive component in such systems is to provide frequency-dependent compensation for the unwanted dispersion introduced by the position-sensing optical cavity. The system's stability is achieved by limiting the frequency band of this compensation. We demonstrate that stable optomechanical PT-symmetric filters comprise a special subclass of such phase-insensitive devices and find entirely new solutions which overcome the sensitivity of PT-symmetric filters. This scheme is robust against optical loss at the output of the detectors and in the cavities.