15 May 2023
The LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) space mission will allow the detection of low frequency gravitational waves and will have a large scientific impact in various fields such as astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics. The LISA mission consists in performing interferometric measurements of laser links exchanged between three spacecraft in heliocentric orbits. The signatures from gravitational waves will be imprinted in those interferometric measurements and will have to be extracted from various instrumental noises. In particular, it will be crucial to reduce the laser frequency noise by about 8 orders of magnitude in order to reach the sensitivity required to detect gravitational waves. This will be achieved by a technique named “Time Delay Interferometry” (TDI) which combines the various interferometric measurements by applying temporal delays. This procedure will be performed during the data pre-processing step which will also reduce various other noises present in the LISA data. The resulting TDI data will be used to search for gravitational waves.
The SYRTE Theory and Metrology Group is developing new methods to reduce various noises in the LISA data efficiently in order to detect gravitational waves and to extract scientific results for various types of sources. These methods will then be implemented in a LISA data preprocessing pipeline.
A first innovative result was obtained in 2022 and is described in Olaf Hartwig, Jean-Baptiste Bayle, Martin Staab, Aurélien Hees, Marc Lilley, and Peter Wolf, Phys. Rev. D 105, 122008 (2022)
Contacts: Aurélien Hees, Marc Lilley, Peter Wolf.