Building a 3.5 m prototype interferometer for the Q & A vacuum birefringence experiment and high precision ellipsometry

We have built and tested a 3.5 m high-finesse Fabry-Perot prototype inteferometer with a precision ellipsometer for the QED test and axion search (Q & A) experiment. We use X-pendulum-double-pendulum suspension designs and automatic control schemes developed by the gravitational-wave detection community. Verdet constant and Cotton-Mouton constant of the air are measured as a test. Double modulation with polarization modulation 100 Hz and magnetic-field modulation 0.05 Hz gives 10^{-7} rad phase noise for a 44-minute integration.