Mathematical model of thermal shields for long-term stability optical resonators

Modern experiments aiming at tests of fundamental physics, like measuring gravitational waves or testing Lorentz Invariance with unprecedented accuracy, require thermal environments that are highly stable over long times. To achieve such a stability, the experiment including typically an optical resonator is nested in a thermal enclosure, which passively attenuates external temperature fluctuations to acceptable levels. These thermal shields are usually designed using tedious numerical simulations or with simple analytical models. In this paper, we propose an accurate analytical method to estimate the performance of passive thermal shields in the frequency domain, which allows for fast evaluation and optimization. The model analysis has also unveiled interesting properties of the shields, such as dips in the transfer function for some frequencies under certain combinations of materials and geometries. We validate the results by comparing them to numerical simulations performed with commercial software based on finite element methods. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America