Measurement of the seismic attenuation performance of the VIRGO Superattenuator

The gravitational wave detector VIRGO aims at extending the detection band down to a few Hertz by isolating the mirrors of the interferometer from seismic noise. This result is achieved by hanging each mirror through an elastic suspension (Superattenuator), designed to filter mechanical vibrations in all the degrees of freedom. An experimental upper limit of the mirror residual seismic noise at a few Hertz is provided in this paper. This is lower than the thermal noise floor, expected to limit the antenna sensitivity in the low frequency range.     

A local control system for the test masses of the Virgo gravitational wave detector

The mirrors of interferometric detectors of gravitational waves (GW) are suspended in order to be isolated from external disturbances. A local control system able to keep them correctly aligned and to damp the angular modes of the suspension is necessary. In this paper we present the solution adopted for Virgo based on a CCD camera sensor and on digital controls. With this solution the mirrors are kept aligned at the level of less than 1 μrad rms, enough to lock the interferometer and start the automatic alignment system.     

A cryogenic payload for the 3rd generation of gravitational wave interferometers

Thermal noise is a limiting factor of interferometric gravitational wave detectors sensitivity in the low and intermediate frequency range. A concrete possibility for beating this limit, is represented by the development of a cryogenic last stage suspension to be integrated within a complex seismic isolation system. To this purpose a last stage payload prototype has been designed and built. It has been suspended within a dedicated cryostat with the same technique adopted for the VIRGO payload and making use of two thin wires in a cradle configuration to support a mirror made of silicon.The cooling strategy, the thermal behaviour and the system mechanical response have been deeply studied while a measurement characterization campaign has been performed both at room temperature and at cryogenic temperature. In this paper, the preliminary results obtained together with the first cooling down of the 300 kg overall mass payload at about 25 K, are reported. This study will play a driving role in the design of the third generation gravitational wave detector.     

KAGRA引力波探测器中频率相关压缩态实验进展

随着技术的发展,下一代引力波探测器的激光功率将得到进一步提高。大光斑半径的应用也将使探测器的热噪声进一步降低,因此,量子噪声将成为在全频段限制引力波探测器灵敏度的首要因素。作为目前最有保障的一种降低量子噪声的技术,频率相关压缩态很可能将被应用于下一代所有引力波探测器中^[1]。频率相关压缩态可以通过将频率不相关压缩态与滤波腔相结合而产生。基于滤波腔具有的频率响应特性,这一技术的应用可以使低频波段的辐射压噪声有效降低,同时实现高频波段散粒噪声的降低,从而实现全探测频段灵敏度的提升。基于日本KAGRA引力波探测器的设计,我们预计将9dB压缩度的压缩态与周损失为8×10^-5的300m滤波腔相结合,可以使探测器灵敏度在全探测频段提高1倍。此实验于2015年开始,目前滤波腔的安装调试已经基本完成,得到的结果基本与实验前的模拟相符合。与频率不相关压缩态光学实验台的安装过程也已经过半,通过温度和控制回路的调制,二次谐波腔的转化率已经超过50%。     

KAGRA引力波探测器中蓝宝石测试镜光学性质研究

低温制冷技术是下一代激光干涉仪引力波探测器的核心技术之一. 日本引力波探测器KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector)作为该技术的前沿开拓者, 将运行在20K的超低温环境中, 并使用在低温下热噪声较低的单晶蓝宝石晶体作为测试镜. 然而, 高质量大尺寸低吸收率的蓝宝石晶体极难制备. 此外, 由于蓝宝石晶体存在晶格结构不均匀, 很容易导致不必要的双折射效应, 从而影响探测器的目标灵敏度. 基于上述问题, 开发了两套大尺寸光学测量系统, 首次系统研究了KAGRA低温蓝宝石测试镜的光学特性. 首先, 根据探测器对测试镜热噪声的要求, 开发了一套基于光热共光路干涉技术的光学测量系统, 该系统可对测试镜以及测试镜表面涂层的光学吸收进行有效的表征. 其次, 基于光学吸收测量系统, 开发了一套双折射效应测量系统, 该系统可以有效表征测试镜中双折射的均匀性. 目前两套测量系统的搭建与调试已完成, 对蓝宝石测试镜光学吸收的测量灵敏度达到了1.5ppm/cm, 双折射测量系统的空间分辨率小于0.3mm times 0.3mm. 该工作对降低大尺寸低温测试镜双折射效应及提高探测器灵敏度具有重要意义.     

Evidence for Stellar Streaming in the Cores of Elliptical Galaxies: A Kinematic Signature of Mergers?

We present evidence for non-Gaussian velocity fields within the cores of luminous elliptical galaxies. This evidence is based on high signal-to-noise ratio, medium-resolution spectroscopy of the cores of early-type members of the Virgo and Coma Clusters obtained with the Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO 3.5 m telescope. The Virgo data were acquired using an integral-field unit (DensePak), which allows the velocity field to be sampled over a variety of spatial scales. The Coma data were obtained through single 2&arcsec; diameter fibers. The cross-correlation profiles of luminous elliptical galaxies show considerable structure, often having several features with amplitudes as high as 10% that of the cross-correlation peak itself. This structure is most obvious within a radius of 1&farcs;5 (at Virgo), or 相似文献   

A Proposal for Establishing A Gravitational-Wave Detector Interferometer in Pakistan

The proposed ‘Gravitational-Wave Antenna Detector InteRferometer (GWADIR)’ will be a 3 km × 3 km Fabry-Perot type laser interferometer. The laser oscillator to be used will be a DL excited Nd-YAG laser with a minimum output of 100 Watts. The optical system will consist of 25 cm diameter Recycler, Beam Splitter, and Near/End Mirrors for each of two Ducts. The mirror system will be suspended by fine wires to isolate the system from the seismic noises of the earth. The output light emerging from the interferometer will be split into 8 beams and sent to 8 different interference detectors. These detectors will measure the interference intensities for the recombined light from the separate legs of the interferometer. The effective amplification due to the interferometer cavities will allow measurements of displacements to better than 10 times the wavelength of the laser light. A high vacuum of 10-8 Torrs will be maintained throughout the system, using turbo-molecular and ion pumps. The detector is designed to reach strain sensitivities from gravitational sources of h<10-23 (Hz)- 1/2 with a broad-band and narrow-band measurement capability in the range of frequencies from 50 Hz to 10 ⁴ Hz, thus allowing it to detect ‘standard’ signals from such sources as coalescing neutron stars or black-holes out to the edge of the universe. If enough funding became available, the project is expected to complete by the middle of the next decade. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The radio environment of the 21 Centimeter Array:RFI detection and mitigation

Detection and mitigation of radio frequency interference(RFI) is the first and also the key step for data processing in radio observations, especially for ongoing low frequency radio experiments towards the detection of the cosmic dawn and epoch of reionization(Eo R). In this paper we demonstrate the technique and efficiency of RFI identification and mitigation for the 21 Centimeter Array(21CMA), a radio interferometer dedicated to the statistical measurement of Eo R. For terrestrial, man-made RFI, we concentrate mainly on a statistical approach by identifying and then excising non-Gaussian signatures, in the sense that the extremely weak cosmic signal is actually buried under thermal and therefore Gaussian noise. We also introduce the so-called visibility correlation coefficient instead of conventional visibility, which allows a further suppression of rapidly time-varying RFI. Finally, we briefly discuss removals of the sky RFI, the leakage of sidelobes from off-field strong radio sources with time-invariant power and a featureless spectrum. It turns out that state of the art technique should allow us to detect and mitigate RFI to a satisfactory level in present low frequency interferometer observations such as those acquired with the 21 CMA, and the accuracy and efficiency can be greatly improved with the employment of low-cost, high-speed computing facilities for data acquisition and processing.     

Measuring the sizes of stars

The Chatterton Astronomy Department aims to apply interferometers with very high resolving power to optical astronomy. The programme of the stellar intensity interferometer at Narrabri Observatory was completed in 1972 and since then the work has been directed towards building a more sensitive instrument with higher resolving power. As a first step a much larger intensity interferometer was designed but was not built because it was large, expensive and not as sensitive as desired. Efforts are now being made to design a more sensitive and cheaper instrument. A version of Michelson’s stellar interferometer is being built using modern techniques. It is hoped that it will reach stars of magnitude +8 and will work reliably in the presence of atmospheric scintillation. It is expected to cost considerably less than an intensity interferometer of comparable performance. The pilot model of this new instrument is almost complete and should be ready for test in 1984. Text of an Academy Lecture delivered at the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore on January 27, 1984.     

Implementation of an optimized Cassegrain system for radio telescopes

We present the antenna design for a radio interferometer, the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager, together with its beam pattern measurement. Our aim was to develop a low-cost system with high aperture efficiency and low ground spill across the frequency range 12–18 GHz. We use a modified Cassegrain system consisting of a commercially available paraboloidal primary mirror with a diameter of 3.7 m, and a shaped secondary mirror. The secondary mirror is oversized with respect to a ray optics design and has a surface that is bent towards the primary near its outer edge using a square term for the shaping. The antennas are simple to manufacture and therefore their cost is low. The design increased the antenna gain by approximately 10 per cent compared to a normal Cassegrain system while still maintaining low contamination from ground spill and using a simple design for the horn.     

Star-Forming Galaxies in Dense Environments

We report on preliminary results from an ongoing study of star-forming galaxies in the Virgo Cluster with the aim of understanding the role played by the environment on their evolution. First, the chemical evolution of nine spiral galaxies located in the inner parts of the cluster has been studied using chemical abundances recomputed for a sample of HII regions. Second, long-slit optical spectroscopy has been obtained for 22 blue dwarf galaxies selected across the Virgo central field. This sample is a subset of a larger list of dwarf galaxies for which deep Hα imaging has been collected. Chemical abundances have been derived for the sample using either a direct estimation of the electron temperature or empirical calibrations. Abundance results correlate with blue and near infrared magnitude, total HI mass and color. This revised version was published online in September 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The difference between the nearby galaxies and the Virgo cluster

The sample of galaxies within 7 Mpc has been compared with that of the Virgo cluster in order to find new and confirm already known differences which may be caused by the environment. The well-known morphology-density relation is found to be valid not only for luminous galaxies but also for faint objects. The differences in the global luminosity functions are mainly caused by the different composition of the samples, whereas the luminosity functions of narrow morphological subgroups, with the exception of the irregulars, probably are not dependent on the density or on other quantities. The already observed HI-deficiency of the interstellar medium of the Virgo cluster spirals has been confirmed. There is a steep drop of this quantity with increasing distance from the dominant galaxies M 87 and M 49. The interstellar dust masses of Virgo cluster spirals and irregulars have been estimated from far-infrared fluxes. These data have been combined with the HI masses in order to obtain the gas-to-dust ratios, which come out to be smaller by a factor of 4 for the Virgo cluster spiral galaxies than for the nearby systems, on the average. The gas-to-dust ratio is strongly correlated with the HI-deficiency. These results support the concept of the ram pressure of the intracluster medium on the spiral galaxies in the core of the Virgo cluster.     

Age and metallicity of compact stellar systems in Virgo and Fornax

From high signal-to-noise ratio GMOS-N and AAOmega spectra, we have measured line-strength indices in the Lick/IDS system for several luminous and spatially dispersed compact stellar systems (CSSs) located in the Virgo and Fornax galaxy clusters. We estimate their [α/Fe] ratios, ages and metallicities using a simple (single-burst) stellar population model. We confirm that the Virgo core region luminous CSSs (     ) contain ancient stellar populations with subsolar total metallicities, suggesting that they comprise the bright tail of M87's GC distribution. The two Virgo intracluster globular clusters have ages and metallicities consistent with the cluster core CSSs. Two Fornax luminous CSSs also have ancient stellar populations but are at the upper end of the Virgo CSS metallicity range, while the third (UCD3) appears to be relatively young, metal-rich and with a core + halo radial profile. Our results suggest that Fornax may contain an extra population of luminous CSSs formed more recently than the ancient GC-like systems found in both clusters.     

Phaseless VLBI mapping of compact extragalactic radio sources

The problem of phaseless aperture synthesis is of current interest in phase-unstable VLBI with a small number of elements when either the use of closure phases is not possible (a two-element interferometer) or their quality and number are not enough for acceptable image reconstruction by standard adaptive calibration methods. Therefore, we discuss the problem of unique image reconstruction only from the spectrum magnitude of a source. We suggest an efficient method for phaseless VLBI mapping of compact extragalactic radio sources. This method is based on the reconstruction of the spectrum magnitude for a source on the entire UV plane from the measured visibility magnitude on a limited set of points and the reconstruction of the sought-for image of the source by Fienup's method from the spectrum magnitude reconstructed at the first stage. We present the results of our mapping of the extragalactic radio source 2200+420 using astrometric and geodetic observations on a global VLBI array. Particular attention is given to studying the capabilities of a two-element interferometer in connection with the putting into operation of a Russian-made radio interferometer based on Quasar RT-32 radio telescopes.     

Interferometry basics in practice: Exercises

The following exercises aim to learn the link between the object intensity distribution and the corresponding visibility curves of a long-baseline optical interferometer. They are also intended to show the additional constraints on observability that an interferometer has.This practical session is meant to be carried out with the ASPRO software, from the Jean-Marie Mariotti Center, but can also be done using other observation preparation software, such as viscalc from ESO.There are two main parts with series of exercises and the exercises corrections. The first one aims at understanding the visibility and its properties by practicing with simple examples, and the second one is about UV coverage.     

X-ray emission from the galaxies in Abell 2634

It is difficult to detect X-ray emission associated with galaxies in rich clusters, because the X-ray images of the clusters are dominated by the emission from their hot intracluster media (ICM). Only the nearby Virgo cluster provides us with information about the X-ray properties of galaxies in clusters. Here we report on the analysis of a deep ROSAT HRI image of the moderately rich cluster Abell 2634, by which we have been able to detect the X-ray emission from the galaxies in the cluster. The ICM of Abell 2634 is an order of magnitude denser than that of the Virgo cluster, and so this analysis allows us to explore the X-ray properties of individual galaxies in the richest environment yet explored.
By stacking the X-ray images of the galaxies together, we show that the emission from the galaxies appears to be marginally resolved by the HRI. This extent is smaller than for galaxies in poorer environments, and is comparable to the size of the galaxies in optical light. These facts suggest that the detected X-ray emission originates from the stellar populations of the galaxies, rather than from extended hot interstellar media. Support for this hypothesis comes from placing the optical and X-ray luminosities of these galaxies in the L_B–L_X plane: the galaxies of Abell 2634 lie in the region of this plane where models indicate that all the X-ray emission can be explained by the usual population of X-ray binaries. It is therefore probable that ram pressure stripping has removed the hot gas component from these galaxies.     

Searching for tidal tails – investigating galaxy harassment

Galaxy harassment has been proposed as a physical process that morphologically transforms low surface density disc galaxies into dwarf elliptical galaxies in clusters. It has been used to link the observed very different morphology of distant cluster galaxies (relatively more blue galaxies with 'disturbed' morphologies) with the relatively large numbers of dwarf elliptical galaxies found in nearby clusters. One prediction of the harassment model is that the remnant galaxies should lie on low surface brightness tidal streams or arcs. We demonstrate in this paper that we have an analysis method that is sensitive to the detection of arcs down to a surface brightness of 29 B μ and we then use this method to search for arcs around 46 Virgo cluster dwarf elliptical galaxies. We find no evidence for tidal streams or arcs and consequently no evidence for galaxy harassment as a viable explanation for the relatively large numbers of dwarf galaxies found in the Virgo cluster.     

Direct detection and characterization of extrasolar planets: The Mariotti space interferometer

Space infrared nulling interferometry has been identified as one of the most promising techniques for direct detection of Earthlike extrasolar planets and spectroscopic analysis of their atmospheres in the near future. After a review of various nulling interferometer schemes, we introduce the concept of internal modulation. As an illustration, we describe a two-dimensional array of telescopes that provides full internal modulation capabilities: the Mariotti space interferometer. It consists of six free-flying telescopes positioned on the sides of an equilateral triangle and grouped into three nulling interferometers. Their nulled outputs are suitably phase-shifted with respect to each other, coherently recombined, and detected. The phase shifts applied between the nullers are periodically changed, providing signal modulation at a frequency that can be selected to minimize instrumental and background noise. The frequency upper limit is set by the read-out noise of the detectors, and turns out to be ¹⁰⁻¹-¹⁰⁻² Hz for currently available Si:As BIB devices. This “fast” signal modulation allows much better monitoring of the background and detector drifts than when one relies solely on the external modulation provided by the slow rotation of the whole interferometer (at typical frequencies of 3×¹⁰⁻⁴-3×¹⁰⁻⁵ Hz). Mariotti internal modulation, also known as “phase chopping,” thus appears as a major step toward the feasibility of the Darwin and TPF space missions.     

A high-resolution 2800 MHz multi-element interferometer

The design of the East West arm of a multi-element interferometer for solar noise observations in the band 2650–2950 mhz at the Algonquin Radio Observatory, Lake Traverse, Ont., Canada, is outlined. The completed first stage consists of an array of thirty-two 3-meter reflectors extending over 212 meters. In the second stage, four reflectors will be arranged symmetrically about the array for polarization studies, while in the third stage four additional reflectors will be placed to the East to form a compound interferometer. These configurations provide single lobed fan beams with half power widths of 1.5, 0.5 and 0.25 of arc respectively. Scans of the sun taken on April 26th, 1966 with the 32-element array located two widely separated enhancements of radio emission, which produced a small gradual rise and fall burst on the solar patrol record.     

Multiwavelength observations of an evolved galaxy group: an end-point of galaxy merging?

The group of galaxies RXJ1340.6+4018 has approximately the same bolometric X-ray luminosity as other bright galaxy groups and poor clusters such as the Virgo cluster. However, 70 per cent of the optical luminosity of the group comes from a dominant giant elliptical galaxy, compared with 5 per cent from M87 in Virgo.The second brightest galaxy in RXJ1340.6+4018 is a factor of 10 fainter (Δ m ₁₂=2.5 mag) than the dominant elliptical, and the galaxy luminosity function has a gap at about L *.
We interpret the properties of the system as a result of galaxy merging within a galaxy group. We find that the central galaxy lies on the Fundamental Plane of ellipticals, has an undisturbed, non-cD morphology, and has no spectral features indicative of recent star formation, suggesting that the last major merger occurred ≳4 Gyr ago. The deviation of the system from the cluster L _X− T relation in the opposite sense to most groups may be caused by an early epoch of formation of the group or a strong cooling flow.
The unusual elongation of the X-ray isophotes and the similarity between the X-ray and optical ellipticities at large radii (∼230 kpc) suggest that both the X-ray gas and the outermost stars of the dominant galaxy are responding to an elongated dark matter distribution. RXJ1340.6+4018 may be part of a filamentary structure related to infall in the outskirts of the cluster A1774.