Calibration of the LIGO Gravitational Wave Detectors In the Fifth Science Run

J. Abadie, LIGO - California Institute of Technology
B. P. Abbott, University of Glasgow
R. Abbott, California Institute of Technology
M. Abernathy, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)
C. Adams, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
R. Adhikari, Stanford University
P. Ajith, Louisiana State University
B. Allen, University of Florida
G. Allen, University of Birmingham
E. Amador Ceron, National Science Foundation
R. S. Amin, Leibniz University Hannover
S. B. Anderson, Montana State University
W. G. Anderson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M. A. Arain, University of Western Australia
M. Araya, Columbia University
M. Aronsson, University of Texas at Brownsville
Y. Aso, San Jose State University
S. Aston, Lomonosov Moscow State University
D. E. Atkinson, Pennsylvania State University
P. Aufmuth, Washington State University Pullman
C. Aulbert, University of Oregon
S. Babak, Syracuse University
P. Baker, University of Maryland
S. Ballmer, University of Massachusetts
D. Barker, University of Mississippi
S. Barnum, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
B. Barr, Tsinghua University
P. Barriga, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
L. Barsotti, Charles Sturt University
M. A. Barton, Carleton College

Abstract

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a network of three detectors built to detect local perturbations in the spacetime metric from astrophysical sources. These detectors, two in Hanford, WA and one in Livingston, LA, are power-recycled Fabry-Perot Michelson interferometers. In their fifth science run (S5), between November 2005 and October 2007, these detectors accumulated one year of triple coincident data while operating at their designed sensitivity. In this paper, we describe the calibration of the instruments in the S5 data set, including measurement techniques and uncertainty estimation.