TRANSIENT ANALYSIS

Environmental transients such as wind gusts, lightning strikes, cosmic ray showers and earthquakes could potentially produce corresponding transients in the IFO output. In some instances these transients may be large enough to cause the resonant cavities in the arms of the interferometer to come out of "lock". Examples of some of these transients have already been shown in section 3. To study these transients in more detail we plan to develop software modules for the LIGO Data Monitoring Tool (DMT) which will identify transients in the PEM channels and add the time of the transient to the LDAS MetaDataBase. This database will allow us to select only those portions of the data which contain transients and to study the effect of these transients on the IFO output.

It will also be important to correlate these transients with the performance of the LIGO feedback system which is designed to keep the arms of the interferometer in lock. By measuring the rate of large transients, we should be able to predict the performance of feedback system and possibly improve its performance.

The development of the transients tools will necessarily involve processing large amounts of data and will benefit from the work on data reduction discussed above.