http://arxiv.org/abs/2107.05614
The balanced homodyne detection as a readout scheme of gravitational-wave detectors is carefully examined from the quantum field theoretical point of view. The readout scheme in gravitational-wave detectors specifies the directly measured quantum operator in the detection. This specification is necessary when we apply the recently developed quantum measurement theory to gravitational-wave detections. We examine the two models of measurement. One is the model in which the directly measured quantum operator at the photodetector is Glauber’s photon number operator, and the other is the model in which the power operator of the optical field is directly measured. These two are regarded as ideal models of photodetectors. We first show these two models yield the same expectation value of the measurement. Since it is consensus in the gravitational-wave community that vacuum fluctuations contribute to the noises in the detectors, we also clarify the contributions of vacuum fluctuations to the quantum noise spectral density without using the two-photon formulation which is used in the gravitational-wave community. We found that the conventional noise spectral density in the two-photon formulation includes vacuum fluctuations from the main interferometer but does not includes those from the local oscillator. Although this difference implies that the choice of these two detector models is important from a theoretical point of view, in a realistic situation, this contribution from the vacuum fluctuations of the local oscillator is negligible.
K. Nakamura
Tue, 13 Jul 21
13/79
Comments: 39 pages, 5 figures, This is the full paper version of [arXiv:2101.11838 [gr-qc]]