The LISA Pathfinder mission will demonstrate the technology of drag-free test masses for use as inertial references in future space-based gravitational wave detectors. To accomplish this, the Pathfinder spacecraft will perform drag-free flight about
a test mass while measuring the acceleration of this primary test mass relative to a second reference test mass. Because the reference test mass is contained within the same spacecraft, it is necessary to apply forces on it to maintain its position and attitude relative to the spacecraft. These forces are a potential source of acceleration noise in the LISA Pathfinder system that are not present in the full LISA configuration. While LISA Pathfinder has been designed to meet its primary mission requirements in the presence of this noise, recent estimates suggest that the on-orbit performance may be limited by this `suspension noise. The drift-mode or free-flight experiments provide an opportunity to mitigate this noise source and further characterize the underlying disturbances that are of interest to the designers of LISA-like instruments. This article provides a high-level overview of these experiments and the methods under development to analyze the resulting data.
We consider a class of proposed gravitational wave detectors based on multiple atomic interferometers separated by large baselines and referenced by common laser systems. We compute the sensitivity limits of these detectors due to intrinsic phase noi
se of the light sources, non-inertial motion of the light sources, and atomic shot noise and compare them to sensitivity limits for traditional light interferometers. We find that atom interferometers and light interferometers are limited in a nearly identical way by intrinsic phase noise and that both require similar mitigation strategies (e.g. multiple arm instruments) to reach interesting sensitivities. The sensitivity limit from motion of the light sources is slightly different and favors the atom interferometers in the low-frequency limit, although the limit in both cases is severe.
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.
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.
