Speaker
Description
The French contribution to the LISA Consortium, on the instrumental side, focuses on developing optical ground support equipment to validate LISA's performance prior to launch. One key task of the French community is to test and validate the performance of the Interferometric Detection System (IDS).
To this end, the IDS Test Set-Up is currently under development. Its objectives are twofold: to verify that picometric stability is achieved within the Interferometric Detection System, and to characterize the tilt-to-length coupling coefficient of the optical bench interferometers — that is, the coupling between the relative angle of the beams and the interferometric length readout. The test set-up comprises several test benches, including a test mass simulator and a beam simulator bench. A thorough understanding of these benches is essential to identify all systematic effects and confirm that the design meets the noise floor requirements needed to characterize the test specimen.
This contribution is organized in two parts. The first presents the operating principles of the test set-up, with a focus on the Beams Simulator bench and its associated challenges. The second part describes the ongoing simulation work aimed at preparing the test campaign and validating the test benches ahead of characterizing the LISA instrument.