This page provides resources and self-study material on laser interferometry. In particular we cover the topics related to the use of optical systems for gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO. At the same time this is a collection of reference examples for using PyKat.
This course is based on Finesse 2 and Pykat. If you are just starting, we recommend that you use the latest version, Finesse 3, from https://finesse.ifosim.org/. Many of the concepts are still the same but the detailed syntax is different. Finesse 3 combines the functionaility of of Pykat and Finesse in a better way.
Notebooks generated from this course have been used for in-person teaching in a several workshops. You can find and download the material from some of these workshops on dedicated pages:
The course is presented as a selection of IPython notebooks (or Jupyter notebooks), interactive Python notebooks that run in a web browser. You can interact with the notebooks in two ways:
Learn Laser Interferometry by D. Toyra,
D. Brown and A. Freise is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License. The code is also made
available under the
GNU General
Public License (GPLv3).
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available via http://www.gwoptics.org/contact/.
At the Gravitational Wave
Group in Birmingham, UK, we work on the optical design and
technologies of the laser interferometers for gravitational wave
detection. For example, we led the optical design
of the Einstein
Telescope, the Optical Simulation and Design group towards
the first baseline design of
Advanced Virgo
and are contributing
to the Advanced Interferometer Configurations group of
the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
In this course we combine material we have used in the past to
train our graduate students starting in this field, for example as part of the GraWIToN
training network.