TY - JOUR
T1 - Titania Mixed with Silica
T2 - A Low Thermal-Noise Coating Material for Gravitational-Wave Detectors
AU - McGhee, Graeme I.
AU - Spagnuolo, Viola
AU - Demos, Nicholas
AU - Tait, Simon C.
AU - Murray, Peter G.
AU - Chicoine, Martin
AU - Dabadie, Paul
AU - Gras, Slawek
AU - Hough, Jim
AU - Iandolo, Guido Alex
AU - Johnston, Ross
AU - Martinez, Valérie
AU - Patane, Oli
AU - Rowan, Sheila
AU - Schiettekatte, François
AU - Smith, Joshua R.
AU - Terkowski, Lukas
AU - Zhang, Liyuan
AU - Evans, Matthew
AU - Martin, Iain W.
AU - Steinlechner, Jessica
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
PY - 2023/10/27
Y1 - 2023/10/27
N2 - Coating thermal noise is one of the dominant noise sources in current gravitational wave detectors and ultimately limits their ability to observe weaker or more distant astronomical sources. This Letter presents investigations of TiO2 mixed with SiO2 (TiO2:SiO2) as a coating material. We find that, after heat treatment for 100 h at 850 °C, thermal noise of a highly reflective coating comprising of TiO2:SiO2 and SiO2 reduces to 76% of the current levels in the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors - with potential for reaching 45%, if we assume the mechanical loss of state-of-the-art SiO2 layers. Furthermore, those coatings show low optical absorption of <1 ppm and optical scattering of ≲5 ppm. Notably, we still observe excellent optical and thermal noise performance following crystallization in the coatings. These results show the potential to meet the parameters required for the next upgrades of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors.
AB - Coating thermal noise is one of the dominant noise sources in current gravitational wave detectors and ultimately limits their ability to observe weaker or more distant astronomical sources. This Letter presents investigations of TiO2 mixed with SiO2 (TiO2:SiO2) as a coating material. We find that, after heat treatment for 100 h at 850 °C, thermal noise of a highly reflective coating comprising of TiO2:SiO2 and SiO2 reduces to 76% of the current levels in the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors - with potential for reaching 45%, if we assume the mechanical loss of state-of-the-art SiO2 layers. Furthermore, those coatings show low optical absorption of <1 ppm and optical scattering of ≲5 ppm. Notably, we still observe excellent optical and thermal noise performance following crystallization in the coatings. These results show the potential to meet the parameters required for the next upgrades of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85176721493
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.171401
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.171401
M3 - Article
C2 - 37955496
AN - SCOPUS:85176721493
SN - 0031-9007
VL - 131
JO - Physical Review Letters
JF - Physical Review Letters
IS - 17
M1 - 171401
ER -