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Published December 2017 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Effects of transients in LIGO suspensions on searches for gravitational waves

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the transient behavior of the Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) suspensions used to seismically isolate the optics. We have characterized the transients in the longitudinal motion of the quadruple suspensions during Advanced LIGO's first observing run. Propagation of transients between stages is consistent with modeled transfer functions, such that transient motion originating at the top of the suspension chain is significantly reduced in amplitude at the test mass. We find that there are transients seen by the longitudinal motion monitors of quadruple suspensions, but they are not significantly correlated with transient motion above the noise floor in the gravitational wave strain data, and therefore do not present a dominant source of background noise in the searches for transient gravitational wave signals. Using the suspension transfer functions, we compared the transients in a week of gravitational wave strain data with transients from a quadruple suspension. Of the strain transients between 10 and 60 Hz, 84% are loud enough that they would have appeared above the sensor noise in the top stage quadruple suspension monitors if they had originated at that stage at the same frequencies. We find no significant temporal correlation with the suspension transients in that stage, so we can rule out suspension motion originating at the top stage as the cause of those transients. However, only 3.2% of the gravitational wave strain transients are loud enough that they would have been seen by the second stage suspension sensors, and none of them are above the sensor noise levels of the penultimate stage. Therefore, we cannot eliminate the possibility of transient noise in the detectors originating in the intermediate stages of the suspension below the sensing noise.

Additional Information

© 2017 Published by AIP Publishing. Received 14 August 2017; accepted 2 November 2017; published online 1 December 2017. LSU authors acknowledge the support of the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) with Grant Nos. PHY-1505779, 1205882, and 1104371. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the NSF for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO, as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of LSC related research by these agencies as well as by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India, Department of Science and Technology, India, Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), India, Ministry of Human Resource Development, India, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare of Italy, the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, the Vicepresidència i Conselleria d'Innovació, Recerca i Turisme and the Conselleria d'Educació i Universitat del Govern de les Illes Balears, the European Union, the Royal Society, the Scottish Funding Council, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance, the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA), the National Research Foundation of Korea, Industry Canada and the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation, International Center for Theoretical Physics South American Institute for Fundamental Research (ICTP-SAIFR), Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Leverhulme Trust, the Research Corporation, Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan, and the Kavli Foundation. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the NSF, STFC, MPS, and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for provision of computational resources.

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Published - 1.5000264.pdf

Submitted - 1702.04701.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 21, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023