The Disturbance Errors of a Spherical Free-Float Proof Mass in the LISA Satellite

The PDF paper on this page may be downloaded directly from this website with the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Download the Amaldi 4 Paper on the Disturbances of a Spherical Proof Mass in LISA.

This paper has now appeared in Classical and Quantum Gravity, 19 No 7 (7 April 2002), pp 1739-1743.

Since no forces or torques are deliberately applied to a free-floating proof mass and the gap can be very wide, one to two cm; one might guess that a free-floating spherical proof mass not only would be simpler to implement but would also have smaller acceleration disturbances than a single-axis cube. If true, this would open the possibility of extending the low frequency response of the LISA band.

The paper calculates the acceleration disturbance power spectrum and shows that the root spectrum can be about 10 times smaller than the calculated disturbances for cubical proof masses.

The Amaldi 4 Gravitational-Wave Conference

The Fourth Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitation Waves was held on July 8 - 13, 2001 at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. The Department of Physics hosted the conference, and the chairman of the local organizing committee was Professor D. G. Blair.