Reduction and possible elimination of coating thermal noise using a rigidly controlled cavity with a QND technique

Thermal noise of a mirror is one of the most important issues in high precision measurements such as gravitational-wave detection or cold damping experiments. It has been pointed out that thermal noise of a mirror with multi-layer coatings can be reduced by mechanical separation of the layers. In this paper, we introduce a way to further reduce thermal noise by locking the mechanically separated mirrors. The reduction is limited by the standard quantum limit of control noise, but it can be overcome with a quantum-non-demolition technique, which finally raises a possibility of complete elimination of coating thermal noise.