Simulations of laser locking to a LISA arm

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through numerical simulations that laser locking in LISA can achieve highly stable phases and simplify the implementation of time delay interferometry, effectively reducing laser phase noise in gravitational wave measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed simulation of laser locking for LISA, showing potential simplifications over the baseline design for noise removal.

Findings

Laser locking achieves very stable laser phases.

Time delay interferometry effectively removes laser phase noise.

Locking scheme simplifies LISA's implementation of noise mitigation.

Abstract

We present detailed numerical simulations of a laser phase stabilization scheme for LISA, where both lasers emitting along one arm are locked to each other. Including the standard secondary noises and spacecraft motions that approximately mimic LISA's orbit, we verify that very stable laser phases can be obtained, and that time delay interferometry can be used to remove the laser phase noise from measurements of gravitational wave strains. Most importantly, we show that this locking scheme can provide significant simplifications over LISA's baseline design in the implementation of time delay interferometry.