Limiting noises in gravitational wave detectors: guidance from their statistical properties

TL;DR

This paper proposes a statistical correlation method to identify and analyze different noise sources in gravitational wave detectors, aiding their commissioning and sensitivity optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to correlate detector noise with environmental signals using statistical properties rather than transfer functions.

Findings

Method helps identify noise-dominated frequency bands.

Assists in detector commissioning by isolating noise sources.

Potential to improve detector sensitivity by noise analysis.

Abstract

It is expected that interferometric gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO \cite{Barish99} will be eventually limited by fundamental noise sources like shot noise and Brownian motion, as well as by seismic noise. In the commissioning process, other technical noise sources (electronics noise, alignment fluctuations) limit the sensitivity and are eliminated one by one. We propose here a way to correlate the noise in the output of the gravitational wave detector with other detector and environmental signals not through their linear transfer functions (often unknown), but through their statistical properties. This could prove useful for identifying the frequency bands dominated by different noise sources in the final configuration, and also to help the commissioning process.