On the Sensitivity of a Hollow Sphere as a Multi-modal Resonant Gravitational Wave Detector

We present a numerical analysis to simulate the response of a spherical resonant gravitational wave detector and to compute its sensitivity. Under the assump- tion of optimal filtering, we work out the sensitivity curve for a sphere first taking into account only a single transducer, and then using a coherent analysis of the whole set of transducers.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures, published versio

Acoustic properties of a hollow sphere for gravitational wave detectors

We report on experimental work on a small prototype of a hollow sphere, aiming at assessing the feasibility of such a resonator as a third generation gravitational wave resonant detector. We measured the resonant frequencies and quality factors of the spheroidal quadrupolar modes of a welded hollow sphere. The eigenfrequencies are found where predicted by the theory, and the quality factors were degraded from a minimum of 20% to a maximum of 60% with respect to the bulk sphere