Speaker
Description
The proposed long arms of future gravitational-wave detectors pose particular challenges from the perspective of stray light. Light scattered at very low angles from the test masses can interact with the vacuum tubes and couple back to the cavity mode, imprinting phase fluctuations it picked up along the way. A straightforward mitigation technique is the installation of baffles on the tube, such that the chance of recoupling is low, but the design has very little margin for error. In this talk, I will present some of the work undertaken by the Cosmic Explorer Stray Light Group to mitigate beamtube stray light noise. Particular emphasis will be given to the optimization of baffle locations and design, as well as the validation of the models used.