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arXiv · 2608.18877

Estimation of systematic error from bulk deformation of end test mass induced by photon calibrator for LIGO post-O5 gravitational wave projects

Daiki Tanabe·Aloysius Niko·Kun-Yao Chang·Yuki Inoue·Dripta Bhattacharjee·Richard Savage·Henry Tsz-King Wong
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Abstract

We studied the bulk deformation of the end test masses (ETMs) of gravitational wave (GW) detectors caused by calibration devices named Photon Calibrator (Pcal). This bulk deformation is one of the source of calibration error since it induces non-linear displacement from the ideal pendulum motion of the ETM. Particularly, it is the dominant error source above 1500 Hz which is crucial to the studies of neutron star mergers. The displacement also depends on beam offsets of the main interferometer (IFO) beam and Pcal beams. We conceptually described frequency dependent effect of bulk deformation and evaluated it in several cases of the beam offset with finite-element analysis (FEA) software, for ETM models of Advanced LIGO (aLIGO), KAGRA, Advanced Virgo (AdVirgo), and LIGO A#.

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Daiki Tanabe, Aloysius Niko, Kun-Yao Chang, Yuki Inoue, Dripta Bhattacharjee, Richard Savage, Henry Tsz-King Wong. 2026-08-19. Estimation of systematic error from bulk deformation of end test mass induced by photon calibrator for LIGO post-O5 gravitational wave projects. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18877

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