Quiet Coatings: Towards high throughput testing of mirror coating materials for gravitational wave detectors

Event Date:
2022-11-14T11:00:00
2022-11-14T12:00:00
Event Location:
HENN 318
Speaker:
Dr. Kirsty Gardner, Postdoctoral Fellow, Quantum Matter Institute, University of British Columbia
Related Upcoming Events:
Intended Audience:
Graduate
Local Contact:

Mervyn Chan (mervync@phas.ubc.ca)

**We welcome everyone to this event, from upper-level undergraduate students, post-docs and faculty to the general public. Come join us!**

Event Information:

TALK RECORDING AVAILABLE AT: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mADq5Za4GFPS_9Y9er3nZivHHMcqEn_k/view?usp=share_link

Abstract:

Future generations of gravitational wave detectors will need improved mirror coatings so that they can be more sensitive than current detectors. These new mirror coatings must have a low mechanical loss so that they are as low noise – or as ‘quiet’ – as possible. There is a huge number of potential materials to test, so how can we do this testing quickly and efficiently, with as little material waste as possible? One approach, which I will present, is to miniaturize the devices onto which we put the coating materials. We can fabricate tiny mechanical microresonators, with hundreds of microresonators on one chip, and use these to measure coating loss via either free-space optics or integrated (on-chip) waveguides. I will give an overview of this work including device fabrication, the measurement technique and its unique advantages, and recent progress with our measurement system.

 

Add to Calendar 2022-11-14T11:00:00 2022-11-14T12:00:00 Quiet Coatings: Towards high throughput testing of mirror coating materials for gravitational wave detectors Event Information: TALK RECORDING AVAILABLE AT: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mADq5Za4GFPS_9Y9er3nZivHHMcqEn_k/view?usp=share_link Abstract: Future generations of gravitational wave detectors will need improved mirror coatings so that they can be more sensitive than current detectors. These new mirror coatings must have a low mechanical loss so that they are as low noise – or as ‘quiet’ – as possible. There is a huge number of potential materials to test, so how can we do this testing quickly and efficiently, with as little material waste as possible? One approach, which I will present, is to miniaturize the devices onto which we put the coating materials. We can fabricate tiny mechanical microresonators, with hundreds of microresonators on one chip, and use these to measure coating loss via either free-space optics or integrated (on-chip) waveguides. I will give an overview of this work including device fabrication, the measurement technique and its unique advantages, and recent progress with our measurement system.   Event Location: HENN 318