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Completed TRL 3 (started at 2, targeting 3)
This is a proposal to further raise the TRL of the successfully progressing development of the Principal Component Interferometry data analysis method. This effort will apply the previous technical developments to a robust simulated use case, based on the provisional understanding of the data ground segment for the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Mission.
Space-based gravitational wave missions rely on precise comparison of laser phases transmitted across millions of kilometers, and even highly frequency stabilized lasers provide orders of magnitude too much phase in LISA mission phasemeter channels. Developed originally from the long-baseline radio interferometry concept of closure phase, time delay interferometry (TDI) became an essential enabling LISA technology, by which measured phase comparisons are combined through a prescribed set of time-shifts to nearly cancel the laser-noise contribution.
It is known that we can derive the TDI combinations from the eigenvectors of the single-link covariance matrix through a demonstration based on a simplified timedomain analysis assuming white noise and short time series. We have generalized this by building an analytic principle component analysis (PCA) formalism, based on a matrix formulation in the frequency domain readily usable
for gravitational-wave data analysis. We refer to this approach as Principal Component Interferometry (PCI).
By further develop data driven approach beyond current model optimization PCA-based method with a more general, non-parametric description. This version will be more able to automatically compute fundamental quantities currently planned to rely on auxiliary measurements such as ground-based ranging or psuedo-random noise patterns imparted on the later frequency. It will also potentially fit additional challenging problems like so-called arm-flexing.
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