Timing, from both GPS and a cesium clock, is another important aspect of LIGO which dictates much of how measurements are taken. When several atomic clocks are tuned to be in phase with each other and triggered on a 1 PPS GPS signal, the clock signals jitter on the order of nanoseconds. Given that this is tested against multiple clocks, GPS must be the source of the jitters. This may not have a large effect on short term measurements, but for long term integrations such as continuous wave searches, this error may become a problem. After long term data acquisition and analysis, it was found there were distinct periodicities in the jitter. Further analysis was also done to determine whether these jitters were random or deterministic.
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