LIGO Instrument and Data Characterization

This award supports research in relativity and relativistic astrophysics, and it addresses the priority areas of NSF's "Windows on the Universe" Big Idea. This award supports research in gravitational wave astronomy. The last several years have been very exciting in the field, starting with the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015 from a collision of black holes 1.3 billion years ago, and with about 200 detections since then. The LSU group has been a critical contributor to these discoveries. The group's activities in the next years will focus on aspects of characterization of the very complex NSF's Advanced LIGO gravitational wave instruments, as well as the characterization of their data. These efforts are fully integrated with those of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and are closely related to the activities of the LIGO Livingston Observatory, located only 30 miles from the LSU campus. In doing its research, the group will train undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoc, as well as share the research with the general public. The LSU group will pursue research activities in two main topics, all coordinated with the LSC and key to the improvement of detection rates of gravitational waves with the Advanced LIGO detectors. The first topic is about characterizing the Advanced LIGO detector and applications to future designs; the group will help diagnose and improve the detector's sensing and control of the alignment degrees of freedom. The group will model the performance of the system, compare models with actual performance, and then apply the models and the experience to the conceptual development of such systems for upgraded detectors. The second topic is analyzing data from the Advanced LIGO detector; the group will identify and eliminate when possible instrumental artifacts, in particular those related to the group's expertise on scattering sources. The group will eliminate the cause of the transients when possible and find out the artifacts that most affect them. The group will also work on reducing the effect of these artifacts on the low-latency searches for astrophysical signals in LIGO data. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.