No Arabic abstract
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will observe gravitational radiation in the milliHertz band by measuring picometer-level fluctuations in the distance between drag-free proof masses over baselines of approximately five million kilometers. The measurement over each baseline will be divided into three parts: two short-arm measurements between the proof masses and a fiducial point on their respective spacecraft, and a long-arm measurement between fiducial points on separate spacecraft. This work focuses on the technical challenges associated with these long-arm measurements and the techniques that have been developed to overcome them.
Arm locking is a technique that has been proposed for reducing laser frequency fluctuations in the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a gravitational-wave observatory sensitive in the milliHertz frequency band. Arm locking takes advantage of the geometric stability of the triangular constellation of three spacecraft that comprise LISA to provide a frequency reference with a stability in the LISA measurement band that exceeds that available from a standard reference such as an optical cavity or molecular absorption line. We have implemented a time-domain simulation of arm locking including the expected limiting noise sources (shot noise, clock noise, spacecraft jitter noise, and residual laser frequency noise). The effect of imperfect a priori knowledge of the LISA heterodyne frequencies and the associated pulling of an arm locked laser is included. We find that our implementation meets requirements both on the noise and dynamic range of the laser frequency.
LISA is an array of three spacecraft flying in an approximately equilateral triangle configuration, which will be used as a low-frequency detector of gravitational waves. Recently a technique has been proposed for suppressing the phase noise of the onboard lasers by locking them to the LISA arms. In this paper we show that the delay-induced effects substantially modify the performance of this technique, making it different from the conventional locking of lasers to optical resonators. We analyze these delay-induced effects in both transient and steady-state regimes and discuss their implications for the implementation of this technique on LISA.
In this paper, we describe a hybrid-extended Kalman filter algorithm to synchronize the clocks and to precisely determine the inter-spacecraft distances for space-based gravitational wave detectors, such as (e)LISA. According to the simulation, the algorithm has significantly improved the ranging accuracy and synchronized the clocks, making the phase-meter raw measurements qualified for time- delay interferometry algorithms.
In order to attain the requisite sensitivity for LISA, laser frequency noise must be suppressed below the secondary noises such as the optical path noise, acceleration noise etc. In a previous paper (Dhurandhar et al., Class. Quantum Grav., 27, 135013, 2010), we have found a large family of second-generation analytic solutions of time delay interferometry with one arm dysfunctional, and we also estimated the laser noise due to residual time-delay semi-analytically from orbit perturbations due to Earth. Since other planets and solar-system bodies also perturb the orbits of LISA spacecraft and affect the time delay interferometry (TDI), we simulate the time delay numerically in this paper for all solutions with the generation number n leq 3. We have worked out a set of 3-year optimized mission orbits of LISA spacecraft starting at January 1, 2021 using the CGC2.7 ephemeris framework. We then use this numerical solution to calculate the residual optical path differences in the second-generation solutions of our previous paper, and compare with the semi-analytic error estimate. The accuracy of this calculation is better than 1 cm (or 30 ps). The maximum path length difference, for all configuration calculated, is below 1 m (3 ns). This is well below the limit under which the laser frequency noise is required to be suppressed. The numerical simulation in this paper can be applied to other space-borne interferometers for gravitational wave detection with the simplification of having only one interferometer.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will detect thousands of gravitational wave sources. Many of these sources will be overlapping in the sense that their signals will have a non-zero cross-correlation. Such overlaps lead to source confusion, which adversely affects how well we can extract information about the individual sources. Here we study how source confusion impacts parameter estimation for galactic compact binaries, with emphasis on the effects of the number of overlaping sources, the time of observation, the gravitational wave frequencies of the sources, and the degree of the signal correlations. Our main findings are that the parameter resolution decays exponentially with the number of overlapping sources, and super-exponentially with the degree of cross-correlation. We also find that an extended mission lifetime is key to disentangling the source confusion as the parameter resolution for overlapping sources improves much faster than the usual square root of the observation time.