Instrument Development and Data Analysis for LIGO

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The next few years will be very exciting in gravitational wave physics. In 2015-18, the Advanced LIGO detectors will produce data in the first Observing Runs, with increasing sensitivity and likelihood of the first direct detection of the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity. The expected first detected signals will be from neutron stars coalescing to form a black hole, a cataclysmic astrophysical event. Other possible signals from the coalescence of two black holes into a larger one, and from the merging of a neutron star and a black hole, would lead to great astronomical insights of the existence and features of black holes in the Universe. This group's activities focus on aspects of improvement of the Advanced LIGO detectors and the characterization of data from the Advanced LIGO interferometer. These efforts are fully integrated with those of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), and are especially integrated with the activities of the LIGO Livingston Observatory, since that Observatory is located only 30 miles from the LSU campus. The LSU group will pursue research activities in two main topics, all coordinated with the LSC and key to the detection of gravitational waves with the Advanced LIGO detectors. One is detector improvement: diagnosing and improving the detector's noise spectral density, data quality and instrument artifacts; calibration of the detector, including error budget and cross validation with different methods; environmental monitoring and effect mitigation; and diagnosing and reduction of transients in suspended test masses. The second is the characterization of the detectors' data: identifying and vetoing instrumental artifacts; developing quantitative statistical methods to use the result of "follow up investigations" of gravitational wave candidates to measure confidence in their astrophysical nature, and reduce the possibility that they may be due to rare instrumental artifacts.