April 27, 2020 Journal article Open Access

Newtonian-noise reassessment for the Virgo gravitational-wave observatory including local recess structures

Stefan Hild; Jan Harms; A. Singha

The LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaborations have cataloged ten confident detections from binary black holes and one from binary neutron stars in their first two observing runs, which has already brought up an immense desire among the scientists to study the Universe and to extend the knowledge of astrophysics from these compact objects. One of the fundamental noise sources limiting the achievable detector bandwidth is given by Newtonian noise arising from terrestrial gravity fluctuations. It is important to model Newtonian noise spectra very accurately as it cannot be monitored directly using current technology. In this article, we show the reduction in the Newtonian noise curve obtained by more accurately modelling the current configuration of the Virgo observatory. In Virgo, there are clean rooms or recess like structures underneath each test mirror forming the main two Fabry-Perot arm cavities of the detector. We compute the displacements originating from an isotropic Rayleigh field including the recess structure. We find an overall strain noise reduction factor of 2 in the frequency band from 12 to about 15 Hz relative to previous models. The reduction factor depends on frequency and also varies between individual test masses.