Time-delay interferometric ranging for space-borne gravitational-wave detectors

Space-borne interferometric gravitational-wave detectors, sensitive in the low-frequency (mHz) band, will fly in the next decade. In these detectors, the spacecraft-to-spacecraft light-travel times will necessarily be unequal and time varying, and (because of aberration) will have different values on up- and down-links. In such unequal-armlength interferometers, laser-phase noise will be canceled by taking linear combinations of the laser-phase observables measured between pairs of spacecraft, appropriately time shifted by the light propagation times along the corresponding arms. This procedure, known as time-delay interferometry (TDI), requires an accurate knowledge of the light-time delays as functions of time. Here we propose a high-accuracy technique to estimate these time delays, and we study its use in the context of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. We refer to this ranging technique, which relies on the TDI combinations themselves, as time-delay interferometric ranging (TDIR). For every TDI combination, we show that, by minimizing the rms power in that combination (averaged over integration times ∼10⁴ s) with respect to the time-delay parameters, we obtain estimates of the time delays accurate enough to cancel laser noise to a level well below the secondary noises. Thus TDIR allows the implementation of TDI without the use of dedicated interspacecraft ranging systems, with a potential simplification of the LISA design. In this paper we define the TDIR procedure formally, and we characterize its expected performance via simulations with the Synthetic LISA software package.