Tomotada Akutsu

Search for a stochastic background of 100-MHz gravitational waves with laser interferometers

This Letter reports the results of a search for a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GW) at 100 MHz by laser interferometry. We have developed a GW detector, which is a pair of 75-cm baseline synchronous recycling (resonant recycling) interferometers. Each interferometer has a strain sensitivity of approximately 10;{-16} Hz;{-1/2} at 100 MHz. By cross-correlating the outputs of the two interferometers within 1000 seconds, we found h{100};{2}Omega_{gw}<6 x 10;{25} to be an upper limit on the energy density spectrum of the GW background in a 2-kHz bandwidth around 100 MHz, where a flat spectrum is assumed.

The CLIO project

The CLIO project including a 100 m baseline cryogenic gravitational wave laser interferometer and a 100 m baseline geophysical strain meter was conducted in the Kamioka mine in Japan to investigate the technical feasibility of the large-scale cryogenic gravitational wave telescope (LCGT), which is planned to be constructed in the same Kamioka mine with 30 times longer baseline than CLIO, and to demonstrate the collaborative operation between these instruments about long-term continuous operation and gravitational wave signal veto analysis. About the cryogenic gravitational wave interferometer, the whole vacuum system and four cryostats, which house and cool sapphire mirrors, were constructed, and the required vacuum level of 10 −6 mbar and the temperature of 8 K at the inner radiation shield in the cryostat were achieved. About the geophysical strain meter, the obtained geophysical strain in the Kamioka mine was successfully simulated with a finite element model with a good agreement with less than 5% error. The strain meter also verified a permanent ground step change of micrometre order due to some earthquakes. We present the recent progress about the CLIO project.

Laser-interferometric Detectors for Gravitational Wave Backgrounds at 100 MHz : Detector Design and Sensitivity

Recently, observational searches for gravitational wave background (GWB) have been developed and given direct and indirect constraints on the energy density of GWB in a broad range of frequencies. These constraints have already rejected some theoretical models of large GWB spectra. However, at 100 MHz, there is no strict upper limit from direct observation, though the indirect limit by

Current status of the CLIO project

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Vibration-Free Pulse Tube Cryocooler System for Gravitational Wave Detectors, Part I: Vibration-Reduction Method and Measurement

abundance due to big-bang nucleosynthesis exists. In this paper, we propose an experiment with laser interferometers searching GWB at 100 MHz. We considered three detector designs and evaluated the GW response functions of a single detector. As a result, we found that, at 100 MHz, the most sensitive detector is the design, a so-called synchronous recycling interferometer, which has better sensitivity than an ordinary Fabry-Perot Michelson interferometer by a factor of 3.3 at 100 MHz. When we select the arm length of 0.75 m and realistic optical parameters, the best sensitivity achievable is

Progress on the cryogenic system for the KAGRA cryogenic interferometric gravitational wave telescope

h\ensuremath{\approx}7.8\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}21}\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{Hz}}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}

Performance test of pipe-shaped radiation shields for cryogenic interferometric gravitational wave detectors

at 100 MHz with bandwidth

Mirror actuation design for the interferometer control of the KAGRA gravitational wave telescope

\ensuremath{\sim}2\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{kHz}

Characterization of the room temperature payload prototype for the cryogenic interferometric gravitational wave detector KAGRA

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Active damping performance of the KAGRA seismic attenuation system prototype

CLIO (Cryogenic Laser Interferometer Observatory) is a Japanese gravitational wave detector project. One of the main purposes of CLIO is to demonstrate thermal-noise suppression by cooling mirrors for a future Japanese project, LCGT (Large-scale Cryogenic Gravitational Telescope). The CLIO site is in Kamioka mine, as is LCGT. The progress of CLIO between 2005 and 2007 (room- and cryogenic-temperature experiments) is introduced in this article. In a room-temperature experiment, we made efforts to improve the sensitivity. The current best sensitivity at 300 K is about 6 × 10-21/√Hz around 400 Hz. Below 20 Hz, the strain (not displacement) sensitivity is comparable to that of LIGO, although the baselines of CLIO are 40-times shorter (CLIO: 100m, LIGO: 4km). This is because seismic noise is extremely small in Kamioka mine. We operated the interferometer at room temperature for gravitational wave observations. We obtained 86 hours of data. In the cryogenic experiment, it was confirmed that the mirrors were sufficiently cooled (14 K). However, we found that the radiation shield ducts transferred 300K radiation into the cryostat more effectively than we had expected. We observed that noise caused by pure aluminum wires to suspend a mirror was suppressed by cooling the mirror.