Statistical Analysis of LISA Pathfinder Noise

LISA Pathfinder (LPF) is an European Space Agency mission aiming to create the quietest environment for free-falling test masses in order to pave the way to the forthcoming space-based gravitational wave detectors. Reaching such an ambitious target will require a significant amount of system optimisation and characterisation, which will in turn require accurate and quantitative noise analysis procedures. In this paper we present a statistical procedure for the analysis of the noise in spectral domain that is based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The application on LPF synthetic data reveals the versatility of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov approach, which can easily cope with the correlations introduced by the Welch's overlapped segment averaging method for the calculation of the sample spectrum.