Vacuum chamber with seismic isolation of an optical test platform

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A vacuum system with active and passive seismic isolation is requested to establish a test facility for the development of inertial sensors and instruments for future ground-based gravitational wave detectors. Such detectors aim to improve low-frequency performance by several orders of magnitude and to this end, they have to devise novel strategies to reduce seismic noise and test mass control. The here requested facility will enable us to emulate the conditions achieved at large detectors in our laboratory and, in turn, this allows us to flexibly deploy, develop and test various sensors. To this end, a large vacuum chamber with correspondingly large opening is required to create a facility that is ideal to perform fine adjustment and assembly of such sensors. The test volume, situated above an isolated optical breadboard, has dimensions that enable us to also deploy mirror suspensions with a height of up to 1.2m. The length of the volume of about 1.5m also enables us to realize and optical resonator configuration between such suspensions. The isolation concept combines commercial-off-the-shelf items to establish an active isolation of the chamber and a passive isolation of the breadboard inside the vacuum envelope. This approach was chosen to make the system quickly available, while the combination of nested active and passive isolation will enable us to continuously optimize the the isolation and tuning in future experiments. The concept includes, that novel sensors can be tested quickly, without needing to wait or adjust to the more stringent requirements and schedules of such tests in the larger, available infrastructures.