On fine alignment of transmitted beams for TianQin with far-field wavefront error

TianQin is a proposed space-based gravitational wave detector mission that employs inter-satellite laser interferometry. Suppressing measurement noise and achieving high sensitivity requires accurate alignment of multiple onboard interferometers after laser link acquisition. However, due to huge armlengths and varying point-ahead angles, the fine alignment of the transmitted beams can be particularly challenging, which requires taking into account both received laser power and far-field wavefront errors. To tackle this issue for TianQin, which has small point-ahead angle variations, we propose an efficient alignment strategy that relies on finding the maximum-intensity direction of the transmitted beam as the alignment reference. The direction can be estimated through a quatrefoil scan of the local transmitted beam and the corresponding intensity measurement from the remote satellite. Under TianQin’s fixed-value compensation of the point-ahead angles, simulation results reveal that the proposed strategy is capable of aligning the transmitted beams within 20 nrad from the mean value of the point-ahead angles, while the tilt-to-length coupling associated with far-field wavefront error can meet the requirement given a transmitted beam aberration of λ /40 RMS.