No Arabic abstract
Space-based gravitational wave detectors based on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) design operate by synthesizing one or more interferometers from fringe velocity measurements generated by changes in the light travel time between three spacecraft in a special set of drag-free heliocentric orbits. These orbits determine the inclination of the synthesized interferometer with respect to the ecliptic plane. Once these spacecraft are placed in their orbits, the orientation of the interferometers at any future time is fixed by Keplers Laws based on the initial orientation of the spacecraft constellation, which may be freely chosen. Over the course of a full solar orbit, the initial orientation determines a set of locations on the sky were the detector has greatest sensitivity to gravitational waves as well as a set of locations where nulls in the detector response fall. By artful choice of the initial orientation, we can choose to optimize or suppress the antennas sensitivity to sources whose location may be known in advance (e.g., the Galactic Center or globular clusters).
In a space based gravitational wave antenna like LISA, involving long light paths linking distant emitter/receiver spacecrafts, signal detection amounts to measuring the light-distance variationsthrough a phase change at the receiver. This is why spurious phase fluctuations due to various mechanical/thermal effects must be carefully studied. We consider here a possible pointing jitter in the light beam sent from the emitter. We show how the resulting phase noise depends on the quality of the wavefront due to the incident beam impinging on the telescope and due to the imperfections of the telescope itself. Namely, we numerically assess the crossed influence of various defects (aberrations and astigmatisms), inherent to a real telescope with pointing fluctuations.
Coincident observations with gravitational wave (GW) detectors and other astronomical instruments are in the focus of the experiments with the network of LIGO, Virgo and GEO detectors. They will become a necessary part of the future GW astronomy as the next generation of advanced detectors comes online. The success of such joint observations directly depends on the source localization capabilities of the GW detectors. In this paper we present studies of the sky localization of transient sources with the future advanced detector networks and describe their fundamental properties. By reconstructing sky coordinates of ad hoc signals injected into simulated detector noise we study the accuracy of the source localization and its dependence on the strength of injected signals, waveforms and network configurations.
Future space borne gravitational wave detectors will require a precise definition of calibration signals to ensure the achievement of their design sensitivity. The careful design of the test signals plays a key role in the correct understanding and characterisation of these instruments. In that sense, methods achieving optimal experiment designs must be considered as complementary to the parameter estimation methods being used to determine the parameters describing the system. The relevance of experiment design is particularly significant for the LISA Pathfinder mission, which will spend most of its operation time performing experiments to characterise key technologies for future space borne gravitational wave observatories. Here we propose a framework to derive the optimal signals ---in terms of minimum parameter uncertainty--- to be injected to these instruments during its calibration phase. We compare our results with an alternative numerical algorithm which achieves an optimal input signal by iteratively improving an initial guess. We show agreement of both approaches when applied to the LISA Pathfinder case.
The Omicron software is a tool developed to perform a multi-resolution time-frequency analysis of data from gravitational-wave detectors: the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors. Omicron generates spectrograms from whitened data streams, offering a visual representation of transient detector noises and gravitational-wave events. In addition, these events can be parameterized with an optimized resolution. They can be written to disk to conduct offline noise characterization and gravitational-wave event validation studies. Omicron is optimized to process, in parallel, thousands of data streams recorded by gravitational-wave detectors. The Omicron software plays an important role in vetting gravitational-wave detection candidates and characterization of transient noise.
Parametric instability is an intrinsic risk in high power laser interferometer gravitational wave detectors, in which the optical cavity modes interact with the acoustic modes of the mirrors leading to exponential growth of the acoustic vibration. In this paper, we investigate the potential parametric instability for a proposed next generation gravitational wave detector based on cooled silicon test masses. It is shown that there would be about 2 unstable modes per test mass, with the highest parametric gain of ~76. The importance of developing suitable instability suppression schemes is emphasized.