The impact of upconverted scattered light on advanced interferometric gravitational wave detectors

Abstract

Second generation gravitational wave detectors are being installed in a number of locations globally. These long-baseline, Michelson interferometers increase the sensitivity between 10 and 40 Hz by many orders of magnitude compared with first generation instruments. Control of non-linear noise coupling from scattered light fields is critical to achieve low frequency performance. In this paper we investigate the requirements on the attenuation of scattered light using a novel time-domain analysis and two years of seismic data from the LIGO Livingston Observatory.