GW101 — LIGO-India Commissioning Training
A training curriculum for interferometer commissioning, controls, and subsystem science — built for working professionals with heterogeneous backgrounds, taught instructor-led first and self-paced thereafter.
Figure 1:The curriculum’s backbone: a handful of analytical techniques — transfer functions, feedback, noise, resonance, matrix methods — recur across every subsystem. Learn each once, reuse it everywhere.
The organizing idea¶
The detector is a hierarchy of linear systems.
Every commissioning question — how much does this field move when I push that mirror? how fast can this loop correct it? — reduces to a transfer function, a matrix element, or a noise-propagation step. The curriculum teaches one method and grows it: draw the system as a graph → write its coupling (adjacency) matrix by inspection → invert.
The payoff is that the same handful of techniques recur across every subsystem — learn them once, reuse them everywhere:
How a session works¶
The atomic unit is a ~1-hour session: about 30 minutes of lecture and 30 minutes of laptop work. Each session is anchored in a real commissioning question, states measurable objectives, and ends with a hands-on notebook that follows Predict → Model → Measure → Explain with scaffolding that fades from a worked example to an independent task. There are no graded tests — practice and self-checks are private.
Start here¶
The first fully-built session is the pilot for the whole curriculum:
Session 01 — Solving the detector by matrix inversion — Fabry–Perot cavity fields, the cavity ↔ feedback-loop equivalence, and transfer functions in the audio-sideband approximation, all from one matrix recipe.
Its companion laptop notebook runs the recipe end-to-end and checks every result against an analytic limit.