Guided lock of a suspended optical cavity enhanced by a higher-order extrapolation.

Abstract

Lock acquisition of a suspended optical cavity can be a highly stochastic process and is therefore nontrivial. Guided lock is a method to make lock acquisition less stochastic by decelerating the motion of the cavity length based on an extrapolation of the motion from an instantaneous velocity measurement. We propose an improved scheme that is less susceptible to seismic disturbances by incorporating the acceleration as a higher-order correction in the extrapolation. We implemented the new scheme in a 300-m suspended Fabry-Perot cavity and improved the success rate of lock acquisition by a factor of 30.