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Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity
Measurements And Mitigation Of Scattered Light Noise In Ligo, Corey Daniel Austin
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 …
Gravitational Wave Astrophysics: Instrumentation, Detector Characterization, And A Search For Gravitational Signals From Gamma-Ray Bursts, Daniel Hoak
Doctoral Dissertations
In the coming years, the second generation of interferometric gravitational wave detectors are widely expected to observe the gravitational radiation emitted by compact, energetic events in the nearby universe. The field of gravitational wave astrophysics has grown into a large international endeavor with a global network of kilometer-scale observatories. The work presented in this thesis spans the field, from optical metrology, to instrument commissioning, to detector characterization and data analysis. The principal results are a method for the precise characterization of optical cavities, the commissioning of the advanced LIGO Output Mode Cleaner at the Hanford observatory, and a search for …