Estimate of force noise from electrostatic patch potentials in LISA Pathfinder

Abstract This paper discusses force noise in LISA and LISA Pathfinder arising from the interaction of patch potentials on the test mass and surrounding electrode housing surfaces with their own temporal fluctuations. We aim to estimate the contribution of this phenomenon to the force noise detected in LISA Pathfinder in excess of the background from Brownian motion. We introduce a model that approximates the interacting test mass and housing surfaces as concentric spheres, treating patch potentials as isotropic stochastic Gaussian processes on the surface of these spheres. We find that a scenario of patches due to surface contamination, with diffusion driven density fluctuations, could indeed produce force noise with the observed frequency f −2 dependence. However, there is not enough experimental evidence, neither from LISA Pathfinder itself, nor from other experiments, to predict the amplitude of such a noise, which could range from completely negligible to explaining the entire noise excess. We briefly discuss several measures to ensure that this noise is sufficiently small in LISA.