Large Signal Analysis of the Michelson Interferometer with Gires-Tournois Interferometers in its Arms

Abstract

A mathematical model for the transfer function of the Michelson interferometer with Gires-Tournois interferometers in its arms is presented. The model, basically a sineseries function, can easily yield closed-form expressions for the amplitudes of the harmonic and intermodulation components of the output when the input is formed of large-amplitude multisinusoidal voltage. The special case of two-tone equal-amplitude input voltage is considered in detail. The results show that the third-order intermodulation component is always higher than the third-harmonic component. The results also show that the linearity of the Michelson interferometer with Gires-Tournois interferometers in its arms improves with the increase of the front mirror reflectivity. Moreover, the results show that the thirdorder intermodulation exhibits a minimum for relatively large values of the front mirror reflectivity. Furthermore, compared with the traditional Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the results show that a reduction of 15 dB in the third-order intermodulation can be achieved even for relatively small values of the front mirror reflectivity.