RESUMEN
The sensitivity of gravitational-wave detectors is limited by the mechanical loss associated with the amorphous coatings of the detectors' mirrors. Amorphous silicon has higher refraction index and lower mechanical loss than current high-index coatings, but its optical absorption at the wavelength used for the detectors is at present large. The addition of hydrogen to the amorphous silicon network reduces both optical absorption and mechanical loss for films prepared under a range of conditions at all measured wavelengths and temperatures, with a particularly large effect on films grown at room temperature. The uptake of hydrogen is greatest in the films grown at room temperature, but still below 1.5 at.% H, which show an ultralow optical absorption (below 10 ppm) measured at 2000 nm for 500-nm-thick films. These results show that hydrogenation is a promising strategy to reduce both optical absorption and mechanical loss in amorphous silicon, and may enable fabrication of mirror coatings for gravitational-wave detectors with improved sensitivity.
RESUMEN
The motion of a mechanical object, even a human-sized object, should be governed by the rules of quantum mechanics. Coaxing them into a quantum state is, however, difficult because the thermal environment masks any quantum signature of the object's motion. The thermal environment also masks the effects of proposed modifications of quantum mechanics at large mass scales. We prepared the center-of-mass motion of a 10-kilogram mechanical oscillator in a state with an average phonon occupation of 10.8. The reduction in temperature, from room temperature to 77 nanokelvin, is commensurate with an 11 orders-of-magnitude suppression of quantum back-action by feedback and a 13 orders-of-magnitude increase in the mass of an object prepared close to its motional ground state. Our approach will enable the possibility of probing gravity on massive quantum systems.
RESUMEN
Understanding the local atomic order in amorphous thin film coatings and how it relates to macroscopic performance factors, such as mechanical loss, provides an important path towards enabling the accelerated discovery and development of improved coatings. High precision x-ray scattering measurements of thin films of amorphous zirconia-doped tantala (ZrO_{2}-Ta_{2}O_{5}) show systematic changes in intermediate range order (IRO) as a function of postdeposition heat treatment (annealing). Atomic modeling captures and explains these changes, and shows that the material has building blocks of metal-centered polyhedra and the effect of annealing is to alter the connections between the polyhedra. The observed changes in IRO are associated with a shift in the ratio of corner-sharing to edge-sharing polyhedra. These changes correlate with changes in mechanical loss upon annealing, and suggest that the mechanical loss can be reduced by developing a material with a designed ratio of corner-sharing to edge-sharing polyhedra.
RESUMEN
Brownian thermal noise generated by mechanical losses in thin film coatings limits the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors, as well as several high precision metrology experiments. Improving the sensitivity of the next generation of gravitational wave detectors will require optical coatings with significantly reduced mechanical losses. In this paper, we describe a system that we developed to measure the mechanical loss angle of thin film coatings deposited on fused silica substrates. The novelty of this system resides in the capability of parallel measurement of up to four samples and the ability to simultaneously probe all the resonant modes of each sample. This high throughput measurement system allows the exploration of a large number of deposition and material parameters, which can be tuned to achieve low loss coatings.
RESUMEN
Crystalline materials, such as metals, are known to exhibit deviation from a simple linear relation between strain and stress when the latter exceeds the yield stress. In addition, it has been shown that metals respond to varying external stress in a discontinuous way in this regime, exhibiting discrete releases of energy. This crackling noise has been extensively studied both experimentally and theoretically when the metals are operating in the plastic regime. In our study, we focus on the behavior of metals in the elastic regime, where the stresses are well below the yield stress. We describe an instrument that aims to characterize non-linear mechanical noise in metals when stressed in the elastic regime. In macroscopic systems, this phenomenon is expected to manifest as a non-stationary noise modulated by external disturbances applied to the material, a form of mechanical up-conversion of noise. The main motivation for this work is for the case of maraging steel components (cantilevers and wires) in the suspension systems of terrestrial gravitational wave detectors. Such instruments are planned to reach very ambitious displacement sensitivities, and therefore mechanical noise in the cantilevers could prove to be a limiting factor for the detectors' final sensitivities, mainly due to non-linear up-conversion of low frequency residual seismic motion to the frequencies of interest for the gravitational wave observations. We describe here the experimental setup, with a target sensitivity of 10(-15) m/Hz in the frequency range of 10-1000 Hz, a simple phenomenological model of the non-linear mechanical noise, and the analysis method that is inspired by this model.
RESUMEN
Fast Fourier transform (FFT) simulation was used to calculate the power and spatial distribution of resonant fields in optical cavities. This is an important tool when characterizing the effect of imperfect geometry and mirror aberrations. This method is, however, intrinsically slow when the cavities are of relatively high finesse. When this is the case, an accelerated convergence scheme may be used to calculate the steady-state cavity field with a speed that is orders of magnitude faster. The rate of convergence of this method, however, is unpredictable, as many different factors may detrimentally affect its performance. In addition, its use in multiple cavity configurations is not well understood. An in-depth study of the limitations and optimization of this method is presented, together with a formulation of its use in multiple cavity configurations. This work has not only resulted in consistent improvement in performance and stability of the accelerated convergence method but also allows the simulation of optical configurations, which would not previously have been possible.
RESUMEN
High-finesse resonant cavities play an important role in many metrology applications such as gravitational wave detectors. The performance of these cavities can be limited by round-trip losses (RTP) generated by light that is scattered by the mirror surface defects into higher-order modes that are close to resonance. In this paper we develop a detailed model of this effect and we study possible strategies to correct the mirror surface. We show that it is possible to restrict the correction to the combination of a reduced set of surface deformations that can be reproduced on the mirror using projected heating patterns. We show with an optical simulation that by acting on the cavity mirrors it is possible to reduce RTP to the large angle scattering limit. We also show that the optimal correction can be computed without any a priori knowledge of the mirror surface, but based only on measurements of the power stored inside the cavity, thus opening up the possibility of a simple implementation of the proposed algorithm.
RESUMEN
The second generation of ground-based interferometric gravitational wave detectors are currently being built and installed. They are designed to be better in strain sensitivity by about a factor 10 with respect to the first generation. Light originating from the laser and following unintended paths, called stray light, has been a major problem during the commissioning of all of the first generation detectors. Indeed, stray light carries information about the phase of the emitting object. Therefore, in the next generation all the optics will be suspended in the vacuum in order to mitigate their associated stray light displacement noise. Despite this additional precaution, the challenging target sensitivity at low frequency which is partially limited by quantum radiation pressure combined with up-conversion effects, requires more detailed investigation. In this paper, we turn our attention to stray light originating from auxiliary optical benches. We use a dedicated formalism to compute the re-coupling of back-reflected and back-scattered light. We show, in particular, how much care should be taken in designing and setting requirements for the input bench optics.
