Sensitivity Curves for Spaceborne Gravitational Wave Interferometers

Authors

Shane L. Larson, Utah State UniversityFollow
William A. Hiscock
Ronald W. Hellings

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Physical Review D

Volume

62

Issue

6

Publication Date

2000

First Page

062001

Last Page

10

Arxiv Identifier

arXiv:gr-qc/9909080v2

Abstract

To determine whether particular sources of gravitational radiation will be detectable by a specific gravitational wave detector, it is necessary to know the sensitivity limits of the instrument. These instrumental sensitivities are often depicted (after averaging over source position and polarization) by graphing the minimal values of the gravitational wave amplitude detectable by the instrument versus the frequency of the gravitational wave. This paper describes in detail how to compute such a sensitivity curve given a set of specifications for a spaceborne laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory. Minor errors in the prior literature are corrected, and the first (mostly) analytic calculation of the gravitational wave transfer function is presented. Example sensitivity curve calculations are presented for the proposed LISA interferometer.

Comments

Published by the American Physical Society in Physical Review D. Publisher PDF available through remote link.

Author e-print is deposited in arXiv.org.

Recommended Citation

Larson, S. L., Hiscock, W. A., & Hellings, R. W. (2000). Sensitivity curves for spaceborne gravitational wave interferometers. Physical Review D, 62(6), 062001.