The Advanced LIGO detectors are sophisticated opto-mechanical devices. At the core of their operation is feedback control. The Advanced LIGO project developed a custom digital control and data ...acquisition system to handle the unique needs of this new breed of astronomical detector. The advligortsis the software component of this system. This highly modular and extensible system has enabled the unprecedented performance of the LIGO instruments, and has been a vital component in the direct detection of gravitational waves.
LIGO's mission critical timing system has enabled gravitational wave and multi-messenger astrophysical discoveries as well as the rich science extracted. Achieving optimal detector sensitivity, ...detecting transient gravitational waves, and especially localizing gravitational wave sources, the underpinning of multi-messenger astrophysics, all require proper gravitational wave data time-stamping. Measurements of the relative arrival times of gravitational waves between different detectors allow for coherent gravitational wave detections, localization of gravitational wave sources, and the creation of skymaps. The carefully designed timing system achieves these goals by mitigating phase noise to avoid signal up-conversion and maximize gravitational wave detector sensitivity. The timing system also redundantly performs self-calibration and self-diagnostics in order to ensure reliable, extendable, and traceable time stamping. In this paper, we describe and quantify the performance of these core systems during the latest O3 scientific run of LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. We present results of the diagnostic checks done to verify the time-stamping for individual gravitational wave events observed during O3 as well as the timing system performance for all of O3 in LIGO Livingston and LIGO Hanford. We find that, after 3 observing runs, the LIGO timing system continues to reliably meet mission requirements of timing precision below 1 \(\mu\)s with a significant safety margin.
The Advanced LIGO detectors are sophisticated opto-mechanical devices. At the core of their operation is feedback control. The Advanced LIGO project developed a custom digital control and data ...acquisition system to handle the unique needs of this new breed of astronomical detector. The advligorts is the software component of this system. This highly modular and extensible system has enabled the unprecedented performance of the LIGO instruments, and has been a vital component in the direct detection of gravitational waves.
The lock acquisition scheme for the Advanced LIGO optical configuration, which makes use of resonant sideband extraction , is under investigation in the 40 meter prototype interferometer at Caltech. ...The 40m has a similar optical configuration to the one planned for Advanced LIGO which has 5 degrees of freedom for length control. So far we have succeeded in locking the 5 degrees of freedom routinely. The differential mode of arm cavities was locked in the same state as the final setup, and the peak of optical resonance was verified to be around 4 kHz. Currently, since an offset remains in the common mode of the arm cavities, another optical resonance can be seen in common mode optical gain.