Mitigation of the flexing-filtering effect in time-delay interferometry

Abstract In early 2024, European Space Agency formally adopted the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) space mission with the aim of measuring gravitational waves emitted in the millihertz range. The constellation employs three spacecraft (SC) that exchange laser beams to form interferometric measurements over a distance of 2.5 million km. The measurements will then be telemetered down to Earth at a lower sampling frequency. Anti-aliasing filters will be used on board to limit spectral folding of out-of-band laser noise. The dominant noise in these measurements is laser frequency noise which does not cancel naturally in LISA’s unequal-arm heterodyne interferometers. Suppression of this noise requires time-shifting of the data using delay operators to build virtual beam paths that simulate equal-arm interferometers. The non-commutativity of these delay operators and on-board filters manifests as a noise (flexing-filtering) that significantly contributes to the noise budget. This non-commutativity is a consequence of the non-flatness of the filter in-band. Attenuation of this noise requires high-order and computationally expensive filters, putting additional demands on the SC. The following work studies an alternative method to reduce this flexing filtering noise via the introduction of a modified delay operator that accounts for the non-commutativity with the filter in the delay operation itself. Our approach allows us to reduce the flexing-filtering noise by over six orders of magnitude whilst reducing the dependency on the flatness of the filter. The work is supplemented by numerical simulations of the data processing chain that compare the results with those of the standard approach.