Anisotropic hardware injection of gravitational waves into LIGO detectors.

University of Minnesota M.S. thesis. August 2011. Major: Physics. Advisor: Dr. Vuk Mandic. 1 computer file (PDF); iv, 30 p.The goal of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) is to measure very small changes in the length of its arms caused by gravitational waves stretching and compressing space-time. The purpose of this project was to perform a search pipeline test on the LIGO detector using a point source stochastic signal. Here we report an effort to test the LIGO stochastic data-analysis pipeline using a simulated hardware injection. A hardware injection is an end-to-end test that begins with the generation of a signal and ends with the recovery of the signal from the detector’s strain data. The signal is injected into the interferometers by actuating on a test mass (or mirror) in order to shake it to simulate a gravitational wave. We successfully recovered the hardware injection with measured parameters consistent with injected parameters, thus providing an end-to-end test of the stochastic data-analysis pipeline