Evaluation of the performance of polished mirror surfaces for the TAMA gravitational wave detector by use of a wave-front tracing simulation.

We evaluated the performance of polished mirror surfaces for the TAMA interferometric gravitational wave detector by comparing the experimental results with a wave-front tracing simulation. The TAMA mirror surfaces were polished to a roughness of a few nanometer rms. We confirmed that these polished mirrors do not limit the present TAMA sensitivity and that the target shot-noise sensitivity will be achieved with these mirrors, even if a power-recycling technique is introduced in the next stage of the TAMA.