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Full-Text Articles in Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity

Measurements And Mitigation Of Scattered Light Noise In Ligo, Corey Daniel Austin Nov 2020

Measurements And Mitigation Of Scattered Light Noise In Ligo, Corey Daniel Austin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) detectors use 1064 nm lasers to measure the tiny fluctuations in spacetime that occur when gravitational waves pass through the earth. LIGO makes use of advanced coating methods and materials to limit the amount of light that scatters from the main beam, but some amount of light does scatter. This stray light can interact with surfaces inside the interferometer that are not seismically isolated and then recombine with the main beam, introducing excess noise into the gravitational wave channel. This thesis reviews the methods for modeling scattered light with ray tracing software and analytical models, for …


Calibration Transients In Ligo Detectors, Thomas Daniel Abbott Jan 2020

Calibration Transients In Ligo Detectors, Thomas Daniel Abbott

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation describes a novel method of analyzing fluctuations in the time-dependent calibration models of the LIGO interferometers to estimate their effect on strain reconstruction for gravitational-wave detections. The time-dependence of the calibration model of each detector is tracked with a set of parameters which are continuously measured while the interferometers are operating. These parameters track slow variations in the sensing function of the detectors as well as the actuators that hold the detectors in an operational state. The time-dependent parameter data during the second observation run (O2 [November 30, 2016 16:00 UTC to August 25, 2017 22:00:00 UTC]) and …