Active noise cancellation in a suspended interferometer

We demonstrate feed-forward vibration isolation on a suspended Fabry-Perot interferometer using Wiener filtering and a variant of the common least mean square adaptive filter algorithm. We compare the experimental results with theoretical estimates of the cancellation efficiency. Using data from the recent Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) Science Run, we also estimate the impact of this technique on full scale gravitational wave interferometers. In the future, we expect to use this technique also to remove acoustic, magnetic, and gravitational noise perturbations from the LIGO interferometers. This noise cancellation technique is simple enough to implement in standard laboratory environments and can be used to improve signal-to-noise ratio for a variety of high precision experiments. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [doi :10.1063/1.3675891]