May 2006

GEO600 joins the S5 science run

During the last year, the GEO600 team worked hard to lower the noise floor of the detector, especially in the frequency range below 500 Hz. The current sensitivity above 500 Hz is approximately a factor of 4 close to the LIGO detectors. We now stopped commissioning of GEO600 in order to participate full-time in the S5 science run.

Even though working on the detector, we have acquired already 1255 hours (52 days) of calibrated data in science mode since GEO joined S5 on January 20. Since May 2, we have a hardware freeze and concentrate only on high duty cycle, good data quality and detector characterization. Now and then we insert a maintenance period to improve the data quality and in order to measure transfer functions for vetoing and to judge the stationarity of the detector.

We have operator shifts again. Hartmut Grote is the “S5 run coordinator” for the next months.