Improving the absolute accuracy of the gravitational wave detectors by combining the photon pressure and gravity field calibrators [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08249


The absolute accuracy on the estimated parameters of the gravitational wave sources will be fundamentally limited by the calibration uncertainties of the detectors in the next observation runs with increased number of source statistics. Photon calibrators have been the primary tools for the absolute calibration of the test mass displacement relying on the the photon pressure. The current technological limit of the absolute calibration uncertainty on the gravitational wave amplitude is limited to a few~% corresponding to the uncertainty on the laser power standard of the metrology institutes. In order to reduce such uncertainty, we propose a new method using the combination of the photon calibrator and a gravity field calibrator. The gravity field calibrator provides the modulation on the displacement of the test mass by generating the gravity gradient. In previous studies, an uncertainty of the distance between the test mass and the gravity field calibrator has been one of the serious systematic errors of the absolute calibration. To suppress this uncertainty, we newly propose a method to use a combination of quadrupole and hexapole mass distributions. We also estimate the absolute uncertainty of this method to be as low as 0.17~%, which is 10 times less than that of previous methods.

Read this paper on arXiv…

Y. Inoue, S. Haino, N. Kanda, et. al.
Tue, 24 Apr 18
36/87

Comments: 14 pages, 9 figures