Analytic structure of a family of hyperboloidal beams of potential interest for advanced LIGO

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a study of the analytic structure of a family of hyperboloidal beams introduced by Bondarescu and Thorne which generalizes the nearly-flat and nearly-concentric mesa beam configurations of interest for advanced LIGO. Capitalizing on certain results from the applied optics literature on flat-top beams, a physically-insightful and computationally-effective representation is derived in terms of rapidly-converging Gauss-Laguerre expansions. A generalization (involving fractional Fourier transform operators of complex order) of some recently discovered duality relations between the nearly-flat and nearly-concentric mesa configurations is obtained. Possible implications for the advanced-LIGO optical cavity design are discussed.