Sensitivity and performance of the Advanced LIGO detectors in the third observing run

By A. Buikema, C. Cahillane, G. Mansell, C. Blair, R. Abbott, C. Adams, Rana X. Adhikari, A. Ananyeva, S. Appert, K. Arai and 188 more. Physical Review D, 2020

233 citations recorded by the source corpus.

On April 1st, 2019, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO), joined by the Advanced Virgo detector, began the third observing run, a year-long dedicated search for gravitational radiation. The LIGO detectors have achieved a higher duty cycle and greater sensitivity to gravitational waves than ever before, with LIGO Hanford achieving angle-averaged sensitivity to binary neutron star coalescences to a distance of 111 Mpc, and LIGO Livingston to 134 Mpc with duty factors of 74.6% and 77.0% respectively. The improvement in sensitivity and stability is a result of several upgrades to the detectors, including doubled intracavity power, the addition of an in-vacuum optical parametric oscillator for squeezed-light injection, replacement of core optics and end reaction masses, and installation of acoustic mode dampers. This paper explores the purposes behind these upgrades, and explains to the best of our knowledge the noise currently limiting the sensitivity of each detector.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04504243d0447157ce465abe1f6c7e96dedd8caa

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michela Mapelli
2. D. Holz
3. Mario Spera
4. Maya Fishbach
5. N. Giacobbo
6. Ilya Mandel
7. R. O’Shaughnessy
8. T. Bulik

In Geophysics

1. R. O’Shaughnessy
2. Colm Talbot
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In Ocean Engineering

1. E. Thrane
2. Colm Talbot
3. Rana X. Adhikari
4. D. Holz
5. B. Farr
6. Maya Fishbach
7. K. Chatziioannou
8. The Ligo Scientific Collaboration

Citations in the corpus

• GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, background): “The LIGO detectors underwent several upgrades between the end of O2 and the start of O3a [40].”
• GWTC-2.1: Deep extended catalog of compact binary coalescences observed by LIGO and Virgo during the first half of the third observing run (2021, background): “In the time between O2 and the O3, all three detectors underwent significant upgrades that substantially increased their sensitivity [8, 69].”