Over the past 50 years, lunar laser ranging has made great contributions to the understanding of the Earth–Moon system and the tests of general relativity. However, because of the lunar libration, the Apollo and Luno...Over the past 50 years, lunar laser ranging has made great contributions to the understanding of the Earth–Moon system and the tests of general relativity. However, because of the lunar libration, the Apollo and Lunokhod corner-cube retroreflector（CCR） arrays placed on the Moon currently limit the ranging precision to a few centimeters for a single photon received. Therefore, it is necessary to deploy a new retroreflector with a single and large aperture to improve the ranging precision by at least one order of magnitude. Here we present a hollow retroreflector with a 170-mm aperture fabricated using hydroxide-catalysis bonding technology. The precisions of the two dihedral angles are achieved by the mirror processing with a sub-arc-second precision perpendicularity, and the remaining one is adjusted utilizing an auxiliary optical configuration including two autocollimators. The achieved precisions of the three dihedral angles are 0.10 arcsecond,0.30 arc-second, and 0.24 arc-second, indicating the 68.5% return signal intensity of ideal Apollo 11/14 based on the far field diffraction pattern simulation. We anticipate that this hollow CCR can be applied in the new generation of lunar laser ranging.展开更多
Plasma turbulence may lead to additional wavefront distortion of inter-spacecraft laser beams during the operation of spaceborne gravitational wave(GW)observatories,e.g.Tian Qin.By making use of the Space Weather Mode...Plasma turbulence may lead to additional wavefront distortion of inter-spacecraft laser beams during the operation of spaceborne gravitational wave(GW)observatories,e.g.Tian Qin.By making use of the Space Weather Modelling Framework(SWMF)model and realistic orbit data for the Tian Qin constellation,the characteristic parameters of the plasma turbulence present at the Tian Qin orbit are obtained.As a first step,this work is based on the assumptions that the cold plasma approximation is valid and that the effects of the electromagnetic field induced by charge separation within the Debye length on the laser's wavefront can be ignored.An atmospheric turbulence-laser interaction model is then applied to analyze the effects of the plasma turbulence on the inter-spacecraft laser's wavefront.The preliminary results show that the wavefront distortion caused by the plasma turbulence is 10^-9 rad,which is significantly less than the designated error budget,i.e.10^-6 rad,and thus will not affect the laser interferometry.展开更多
In this paper,we present a suppression method for the thermal drift of an ultra-stable laser interferometer.The detailed analysis on the Michelson interferometer indicates that the change in optical path length induce...In this paper,we present a suppression method for the thermal drift of an ultra-stable laser interferometer.The detailed analysis on the Michelson interferometer indicates that the change in optical path length induced by temperature variation can be effectively reduced by choosing proper thickness and/or incident angle of a compensator.Taking the optical bench of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna Pathfinder as an example,we analyze the optical bench model with a compensator and show that the temperature coefficient of this laser interferometer can be reduced down to 1 pm/K with an incident angle of 0.267828 rad.The method presented in this paper can be used in the design of ultra-stable laser interferometers,especially for space-based gravitational waves detection.展开更多
基金Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.11655001 and 11605065)
文摘Over the past 50 years, lunar laser ranging has made great contributions to the understanding of the Earth–Moon system and the tests of general relativity. However, because of the lunar libration, the Apollo and Lunokhod corner-cube retroreflector（CCR） arrays placed on the Moon currently limit the ranging precision to a few centimeters for a single photon received. Therefore, it is necessary to deploy a new retroreflector with a single and large aperture to improve the ranging precision by at least one order of magnitude. Here we present a hollow retroreflector with a 170-mm aperture fabricated using hydroxide-catalysis bonding technology. The precisions of the two dihedral angles are achieved by the mirror processing with a sub-arc-second precision perpendicularity, and the remaining one is adjusted utilizing an auxiliary optical configuration including two autocollimators. The achieved precisions of the three dihedral angles are 0.10 arcsecond,0.30 arc-second, and 0.24 arc-second, indicating the 68.5% return signal intensity of ideal Apollo 11/14 based on the far field diffraction pattern simulation. We anticipate that this hollow CCR can be applied in the new generation of lunar laser ranging.
基金supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation(No.2018M643286)the postdoctoral funding project of the Pearl River Talent Plan。
文摘Plasma turbulence may lead to additional wavefront distortion of inter-spacecraft laser beams during the operation of spaceborne gravitational wave(GW)observatories,e.g.Tian Qin.By making use of the Space Weather Modelling Framework(SWMF)model and realistic orbit data for the Tian Qin constellation,the characteristic parameters of the plasma turbulence present at the Tian Qin orbit are obtained.As a first step,this work is based on the assumptions that the cold plasma approximation is valid and that the effects of the electromagnetic field induced by charge separation within the Debye length on the laser's wavefront can be ignored.An atmospheric turbulence-laser interaction model is then applied to analyze the effects of the plasma turbulence on the inter-spacecraft laser's wavefront.The preliminary results show that the wavefront distortion caused by the plasma turbulence is 10^-9 rad,which is significantly less than the designated error budget,i.e.10^-6 rad,and thus will not affect the laser interferometry.
基金supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (No. 2021A1515010198)the Guangzhou Science and Technology Plan Project (No. 202102020794)the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2020YFC2200500)
文摘In this paper,we present a suppression method for the thermal drift of an ultra-stable laser interferometer.The detailed analysis on the Michelson interferometer indicates that the change in optical path length induced by temperature variation can be effectively reduced by choosing proper thickness and/or incident angle of a compensator.Taking the optical bench of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna Pathfinder as an example,we analyze the optical bench model with a compensator and show that the temperature coefficient of this laser interferometer can be reduced down to 1 pm/K with an incident angle of 0.267828 rad.The method presented in this paper can be used in the design of ultra-stable laser interferometers,especially for space-based gravitational waves detection.
