GW: CALVA/Exsqueez

CALVA / Exsqueez

The in-air optical bench used to prepare laser beams which will enter the vacuum chamber (red container in the back) where squeezing is produced and characterized.

Exsqueez is an ANR-funded project recognized by the Virgo collaboration. It aims at studying new configurations for frequency-dependent squeezing in vacuum in order to improve gravitational-wave detection.

The main focuses are a new geometry of the Optical Parametric Oscillator (source of squeezed light) and the quality of the vacuum, and in particular, their impact in terms of obtainable squeezing magnitude. The aim is to demonstrate their effectiveness in order to implement them in the next upgrade of Virgo.

Simplified scheme of the Exsqueez setup.