The response of elastic materials to external changing conditions can proceed through small and discrete releases of stress, rather than a continuous and smooth deformation as described by the ...classical elasticity theory. In a macroscopic elastic body, the sum of all those small crackling events can create a detectable displacement noise (crackling noise). In this paper we consider the case of the steel cantilevers used in the seismic isolation systems of ground based gravitational wave detectors, to provide the vertical isolation needed to reach the detector target sensitivity. Those instruments are reaching unprecedented displacement sensitivity, at a level that might be limited by crackling noise in the aforementioned cantilevers. Understanding this source of noise is extremely important, especially considering its intrinsic nonlinear nature. Since a detailed microscopical model of crackling noise in polycrystalline steel is not available at the moment, we suggest a phenomenological microscopical model, and the focus of this paper is on how crackling noise scales with the size and geometry of the cantilevers. The goal of this paper is to provide a method to scale up future measurements of crackling noise from small test cantilevers to the large ones used in advanced gravitational wave detectors.
Signal extraction out of background noise is a common challenge in high-precision physics experiments, where the measurement output is often a continuous data stream. To improve the signal-to-noise ...ratio of the detection, witness sensors are often used to independently measure background noises and subtract them from the main signal. If the noise coupling is linear and stationary, optimal techniques already exist and are routinely implemented in many experiments. However, when the noise coupling is nonstationary, linear techniques often fail or are suboptimal. Inspired by the properties of the background noise in gravitational wave detectors, this work develops a novel algorithm to efficiently characterize and remove nonstationary noise couplings, provided there exist witnesses of the noise source and of the modulation. In this work, the algorithm is described in its most general formulation, and its efficiency is demonstrated with examples from the data of the Advanced LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, where we could obtain an improvement of the detector gravitational-wave reach without introducing any bias on the source parameter estimation.
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.
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.
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.
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