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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Unequal Arm Space-Borne Gravitational Wave Detectors, Shane L. Larson, Ronald W. Hellings, William A. Hiscock
Unequal Arm Space-Borne Gravitational Wave Detectors, Shane L. Larson, Ronald W. Hellings, William A. Hiscock
All Physics Faculty Publications
Unlike ground-based interferometric gravitational wave detectors, large space-based systems will not be rigid structures. When the end stations of the laser interferometer are freely flying spacecraft, the armlengths will change due to variations in the spacecraft positions along their orbital trajectories, so the precise equality of the arms that is required in a laboratory interferometer to cancel laser phase noise is not possible. However, using a method discovered by Tinto and Armstrong, a signal can be constructed in which laser phase noise exactly cancels out, even in an unequal arm interferometer. We examine the case where the ratio of the …
The Lisa Optimal Sensitivity, Thomas A. Prince, Massimo Tinto, Shane L. Larson, J. W. Armstrong
The Lisa Optimal Sensitivity, Thomas A. Prince, Massimo Tinto, Shane L. Larson, J. W. Armstrong
All Physics Faculty Publications
The multiple Doppler readouts available on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) permit simultaneous formation of several interferometric observables. All these observables are independent of laser frequency fluctuations and have different couplings to gravitational waves and to the various LISA instrumental noises. Within the functional space of interferometric combinations LISA will be able to synthesize, we have identified a triplet of interferometric combinations that show optimally combined sensitivity. As an application of the method, we computed the sensitivity improvement for sinusoidal sources in the nominal, equal-arm LISA configuration. In the part of the Fourier band where the period of the …