Phase camera experiment for Advanced Virgo

We report on a study of the phase camera, which is a frequency selective wave-front sensor of a laser beam. This sensor is utilized for monitoring sidebands produced by phase modulations in a gravitational wave (GW) detector. Regarding the operation of the GW detectors, the laser modulation/demodulation method is used to measure mirror displacements and used for the position controls. This plays a significant role because the quality of controls affect the noise level of the GW detector. The phase camera is able to monitor each sideband separately, which has a great benefit for the manipulation of the delicate controls. Also, overcoming mirror aberrations will be an essential part of Advanced Virgo (AdV), which is a GW detector close to Pisa. Especially low-frequency sidebands can be affected greatly by aberrations in one of the interferometer cavities. The phase cameras allow tracking such changes because the state of the sidebands gives information on mirror aberrations. A prototype of the phase camera has been developed and is currently tested. The performance checks are almost completed and the installation of the optics at the AdV site has started. After the installation and commissioning, the phase camera will be combined to a thermal compensation system that consists of CO₂ lasers and compensation plates. In this paper, we focus on the prototype and show some limitations from the scanner performance.