Speaker
Description
In VnEXT, the evolution of Virgo beyond the AdV+ project, the sensitivity is expected to improve by a factor of 10 compared to O5. The increasingly high power stored in the interferometer will require high-precision thermal control of the cavity mirrors to cope with the optical aberrations induced by thermal effects resulting from a circulating power up to 1.5 MW.
The Thermal Compensation System (TCS) sensors and actuators, conceived to tackle the aberrations coming from thermally driven effects must be enhanced to cope with a high-power operation of the detector.
The identification of the new requirements and, eventually, the need to change or improve the actuators already adopted is currently under investigation through optical simulations which are fundamental to carefully model the real interferometer behavior and tune its working point.
The outcomes of the modeling study for the case of marginally stable recycling cavities will be presented, focusing on the implementation of an additional ring heater in a symmetric configuration, with the purpose of decoupling the thermo-elastic correction from the associated thermal lens. This device can be beneficial for the TCS actuation independently from the specific optical layout.
