Correcting Laser Mirror Distortion for LIGO

[MolaKule]

Increasing LIGO Sensitivity by Correcting Laser Mirror Distortion

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/ae86aa

 

[dadto2]

My son is an Optical Engineering major. Hopefully he can dumb this down for me, looks very interesting!

 

[RoadDukie]

Increasing LIGO Sensitivity by Correcting Laser Mirror Distortion

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/ae86aa

TLDR... Sorry.
Is this similar to what they did to correct Hubbles mirror errors?

 

[4wd]

My son is an Optical Engineering major. Hopefully he can dumb this down for me, looks very interesting!

Optical Contusions are common in my life …

 

[CleanSump]

I found it interesting because a few months ago I read an article about measuring the speed of gravitational waves through observation of a quasar by clocking the gravitational waves against photons from the same source.

 

[barryh]

Sounds like they are thermally imaging the mirrors and then applying localised heating at the edges to even out the temperature which corrects any thermal distortion. Sounds like a negative feedback control analogous to active mirrors on telescopes that also correct for thermal distortion.