Optimal design of calibration signals in space borne gravitational wave detectors

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework for designing optimal calibration signals for space-based gravitational wave detectors, aiming to minimize parameter uncertainty and improve instrument characterization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for deriving optimal calibration signals and compares it with an iterative numerical algorithm, demonstrating their agreement for LISA Pathfinder.

Findings

The proposed framework effectively minimizes parameter uncertainty during calibration.

Both the analytical and numerical methods produce consistent optimal signals for LISA Pathfinder.

Optimized calibration signals enhance the accuracy of instrument characterization.

Abstract

Future space borne gravitational wave detectors will require a precise definition of calibration signals to ensure the achievement of their design sensitivity. The careful design of the test signals plays a key role in the correct understanding and characterisation of these instruments. In that sense, methods achieving optimal experiment designs must be considered as complementary to the parameter estimation methods being used to determine the parameters describing the system. The relevance of experiment design is particularly significant for the LISA Pathfinder mission, which will spend most of its operation time performing experiments to characterise key technologies for future space borne gravitational wave observatories. Here we propose a framework to derive the optimal signals ---in terms of minimum parameter uncertainty--- to be injected to these instruments during its calibration phase. We compare our results with an alternative numerical algorithm which achieves an optimal input signal by iteratively improving an initial guess. We show agreement of both approaches when applied to the LISA Pathfinder case.