Gravitational Wave Detection by Interferometry (Ground and Space)

Abstract

Significant progress has been made in recent years on the development of gravitational wave detectors. Sources such as coalescing compact binary systems, low-mass X-ray binaries, stellar collapses and pulsars are all possible candidates for detection. The most promising design of gravitational wave detector uses test masses a long distance apart and freely suspended as pendulums on Earth or in drag-free craft in space. The main theme of this review is a discussion of the mechanical and optical principles used in the various long baseline systems being built around the world — LIGO (USA), VIRGO (Italy/France), TAMA 300 (Japan) and GEO 600 (Germany/UK) — and in LISA, a proposed space-borne interferometer.

Post-innermost stable circular orbit ringdown amplitudes in extreme mass ratio inspiral

“…Gravitational wave observatories (see for example the reviews [1] and references therein) demand knowledge of the waveform emitted by an inspiralling binary system of compact objects. Analytic control is possible in two limits.…”

“…1 The EOB approach combines quite a number of ideas and ingredients, but here it will suffice to concentrate on its handling of the ringdown phase, which is quite independent of the other ingredients, and is based on the following assumption: the modeled waveforms during the adiabatic and the ringdown phases may be matched together without the need for an independent modeling of an intermediate phase. This assumption was later vindicated by full numerical simulations.…”

“…4 For simplicity we consider the trajectory to be moving in the background of a non-rotating (Schwarzschild) BH, and we moreover consider the 1 The method's main idea is an attempt to carry over to General Relativity (GR) the successful classical reduction of the two body problem to a reduced one body problem, where here in GR the reduced point particle moves in some "corrected" metric background. This background does not solve Einstein's equations and as such seems to offer enough adjustable parameters to fit for the sought waveforms.…”

Laser power stabilization using optical ac coupling and its quantum and technical limits

“…Interferometric gravitational wave detectors [1][2][3] have one of the most demanding power stability requirements. Previous experiments show that traditional power stabilization schemes [4,5] are barely able to fulfill the power stability requirements for next-generation gravitational wave detectors, especially at low Fourier frequencies (<100 Hz).…”

Radiation-balanced simulations for binary inspiral

“…In general relativity, however, the system will emit gravitational radiation, causing the bodies to spiral in towards one another. The gravitational radiation given off by this system is a prime candidate for detection by upcoming gravitational wave telescopes such as LIGO and VIRGO [1].…”