Laser Interferometer for Space Gravitational Waves Detection and Earth Gravity Mapping

Abstract

The idea of using space laser interferometer to measure the relative displacement change between two satellites has been considered for space gravitational waves detection and Earth gravity filed mapping in recent years. Some investigations on the key issues of laser interferometer in our working team have been presented in this paper. An on-ground laser interferometer prototype used for the demonstration of satellite-to-satellite ranging has been constructed, which is equipped with phasemeter, laser pointing modulation and laser phase-locking control. The experimental results show that path-length measurement sensitivity of the laser interferometer reaches 200 pm/√ Hz, and phase measurement precision achieves 2π × 10− 5 rad/√ Hz, and laser pointing modulation precision is better than 80 nrad/√ Hz, and laser phase-locking control precision attains 2π × 10− 4 rad/√ Hz within the frequency regime of 1 mHz–1 Hz. All of these demonstrate that the proposed laser interferometer has very promising feasibility to meet the requirement of the Taiji, TianQin and Space Advanced Gravity Measurement (SAGM) missions which are put forward by Chinese scientists.