Abstract

An active gravity-wave detector based on a solid-state two-arm optical parametric oscillator (OPO) is proposed. The signal and idler waves of a nearly degenerate OPO are internally separated so that the signal beam propagates along one arm of the OPO and the idler beam along the orthogonal arm. The signal–idler beat frequency is monitored to yield a sensitive measure of the path displacement in the two arms of this OPO cavity-interferometer. The beat frequency can be chosen to lie in a low-noise spectral region to minimize the effects of technical noise, such as l/f noise.

© 1991 Optical Society of America