On the round-trip time for a photon propagating in the field of a plane gravitational wave

Understand

A network of large-scale laser interferometers is currently employed for searches of gravitational waves from various astrophysical sources.

• The frequency dependence of the dynamic response of these detectors introduces corrections to their antenna patterns which in principle can affect the outcome of the associated data-analysis algorithms.
• The magnitude of these corrections and the corresponding systematic errors have recently been estimated for searches of periodic and stochastic gravitational waves (CQG 25 (2008) 184017).
• However, the calculation of the detector response in that paper followed the traditional semi-rigorous approach which does not properly take into account the curved nature of spacetime.