This file card and associated related documents are the collection of representative strain sensitivity plots for the aLIGO Interferometers, compared at select times in their commissioning and/or observing process.
This file card shows the latest and greatest strain and displacement sensitivities for the aLIGO interferometers. To see prior sensitivities, to download the ASCII dump of these curves, and to find more details about the detector at that time, follow the tree-structure of related documents at the bottom of this file card.
Caveats:
- This data is merely representative of the detectors performance for 420 [sec] of data, meant to serve as a snap shot for publication. In reality the detector sensitivity varies as a function of time due to the environment and the health of the instruments subsystems. This variation in sensitivity is on the order of 10% (where percent variation is on the detector sensitivity recast as the distance out to which specific astrophysical source type, under a certain choice cosmological parameters, may be detected).
- The calibration for these sensitivities is only valid between 10 Hz and 5000 Hz, for this the only frequency region in which we have well-quantified the uncertainty.
- The uncertainty in amplitude calibration over this band is below 10%, and the accuracy and precision of interferometer's response to a gravitational wave-like signal is known to better than 10% in magnitude and 5 [deg] phase over the 10 to 5000 Hz band.