We describe the effect of the expansion of space on the wavelength of the light beam in a Fabry-Pérot interferometer. For an instrument such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which has high sensitivity and a long period of light storage, the wavelength of laser photons are redshifted due to the expansion of space in each cavity by an amount given by , where is the Hubble constant and is the light storage time for the cavity. Since is based on the cavity finesse which depends on the laser beam full width at half maximum (FWHM) of each cavity, we show that a difference in finesses between the LIGO arm cavities produces a signal at the anti-symmetric output port given by where and are the beam FWHM at time t, respectively, for the X and Y arm cavities and is a beam proportionality constant to be determined expermentally. Assuming , then for cavity beams FWHM of the output signal has the range , which is detectable by advanced LIGO.
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Subject: Physical Sciences - Astronomy and Astrophysics
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