High index top layer for multimaterial coatings

For application in future cryogenically cooled gravitational wave detectors, the thermal noise of low absorbing mirror coatings has to be reduced. The development of low mechanical and optical loss materials is challenging, but thermal noise reduction can be significantly supported by using a multimaterial coating design. We analyze the possible improvement of the total (optical and mechanical) loss of a three-material based coating obtained by optimizing the properties of the top layer of the coating stack. A top-layer material with sufficiently high refractive index could have a significantly higher optical and mechanical loss than currently used tantala, while still enabling reduction of the total coating loss. Restrictions on possible top-layer material properties are made, and the option of a crystalline top layer is discussed

Thermal noise from icy mirrors in gravitational wave detectors

The detection of gravitational waves has established a new and very exciting field of astronomy in the past few years. To increase the number of detections and allow observation of a wider range of sources, several future gravitational wave detectors will operate at cryogenic temperatures. Recent investigations of a mirror in one of the cryostats of the Japanese KAGRA detector showed a decrease in reflectivity due to ice growth, induced by residual water molecules moving from the warm to the cold sections of the detector's vacuum system. Based on the optical measurements made in KAGRA, in this paper we calculate the implications of an ice layer on coating thermal noise for the planned European Einstein Telescope. We find coating thermal noise to oscillate, due to periodic reflectivity changes as the ice layer grows. The average coating thermal noise increases significantly over a time of one year with a larger increase at higher temperatures

Comparison of single-layer and double-layer anti-reflection coatings using laser-induced damage threshold and photothermal common-path interferometry

The dielectric thin-film coating on high-power optical components is often the weakest region and will fail at elevated optical fluences. A comparison of single-layer coatings of ZrO2, LiF, Ta2O5, SiN, and SiO2 along with anti-reflection (AR) coatings optimized at 1064 nm comprised of ZrO2 and Ta2O5 was made, and the results of photothermal common-path interferometry (PCI) and a laser-induced damage threshold (LIDT) are presented here. The coatings were grown by radio frequency (RF) sputtering, pulsed direct-current (DC) sputtering, ion-assisted electron beam evaporation (IAD), and thermal evaporation. Test regimes for LIDT used pulse durations of 9.6 ns at 100 Hz for 1000-on-1 and 1-on-1 regimes at 1064 nm for single-layer and AR coatings, and 20 ns at 20 Hz for a 200-on-1 regime to compare the //ZrO2/SiO2 AR coating

Medium range structural order in amorphous tantala spatially resolved with changes to atomic structure by thermal annealing

Amorphous tantala (a-Ta2O5) is an important technological material that has wide ranging applications in electronics, optics and the biomedical industry. It is used as the high refractive index layers in the multi-layer dielectric mirror coatings in the latest generation of gravitational wave interferometers, as well as other precision interferometers. One of the current limitations in sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors is Brownian thermal noise that arises from the tantala mirror coatings. Measurements have shown differences in mechanical loss of the mirror coatings, which is directly related to Brownian thermal noise, in response to thermal annealing. We utilise scanning electron diffraction to perform Fluctuation Electron Microscopy (FEM) on Ion Beam Sputtered (IBS) amorphous tantala coatings, definitively showing an increase in the medium range order (MRO), as determined from the variance between the diffraction patterns in the scan, due to thermal annealing at increasing temperatures. Moreover, we employ Virtual Dark-Field Imaging (VDFi) to spatially resolve the FEM signal, enabling investigation of the persistence of the fragments responsible for the medium range order, as well as the extent of the ordering over nm length scales, and show ordered patches larger than 5 nm in the highest temperature annealed sample. These structural changes directly correlate with the observed changes in mechanical loss.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Optical absorption of ion-beam sputtered amorphous silicon coatings

Low mechanical loss at low temperatures and a high index of refraction should make silicon optimally suited for thermal noise reduction in highly reflective mirror coatings for gravitational wave detectors. However, due to high optical absorption, amorphous silicon (aSi) is unsuitable for being used as a direct high-index coating material to replace tantala. A possible solution is a multimaterial design, which enables exploitation of the excellent mechanical properties of aSi in the lower coating layers. The possible number of aSi layers increases with absorption reduction. In this work, the optimum heat treatment temperature of aSi deposited via ion-beam sputtering was investigated and found to be 450 °C. For this temperature, the absorption after deposition of a single layer of aSi at 1064 nm and 1550 nm was reduced by more than 80%

The promises of gravitational-wave astronomy

No abstract available

Anomalous optical surface absorption in nominally pure silicon samples at 1550 nm

The announcement of the direct detection of Gravitational Waves (GW) by the LIGO and Virgo collaboration in February 2016 has removed any uncertainty around the possibility of GW astronomy. It has demonstrated that future detectors with sensitivities ten times greater than the Advanced LIGO detectors would see thousands of events per year. Many proposals for such future interferometric GW detectors assume the use of silicon test masses. Silicon has low mechanical loss at low temperatures, which leads to low displacement noise for a suspended interferometer mirror. In addition to the low mechanical loss, it is a requirement that the test masses have a low optical loss. Measurements at 1550 nm have indicated that material with a low enough bulk absorption is available; however there have been suggestions that this low absorption material has a surface absorption of > 100 ppm which could preclude its use in future cryogenic detectors. We show in this paper that this surface loss is not intrinsic but is likely to be a result of particular polishing techniques and can be removed or avoided by the correct polishing procedure. This is an important step towards high gravitational wave detection rates in silicon based instruments

Investigating the medium range order in amorphous Ta₂O₅ coatings

Ion-beam sputtered amorphous heavy metal oxides, such as Ta2O5, are widely used as the high refractive index layer of highly reflective dielectric coatings. Such coatings are used in the ground based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), in which mechanical loss, directly related to Brownian thermal noise, from the coatings forms an important limit to the sensitivity of the LIGO detector. It has previously been shown that heat-treatment and TiO2 doping of amorphous Ta2O5 coatings causes significant changes to the levels of mechanical loss measured and is thought to result from changes in the atomic structure. This work aims to find ways to reduce the levels of mechanical loss in the coatings by understanding the atomic structure properties that are responsible for it, and thus helping to increase the LIGO detector sensitivity. Using a combination of Reduced Density Functions (RDFs) from electron diffraction and Fluctuation Electron Microscopy (FEM), we probe the medium range order (in the 2-3 nm range) of these amorphous coatings

Effect of stress and temperature on the optical properties of silicon nitride membranes at 1550 nm

Future gravitational-wave detectors operated at cryogenic temperatures are expected to be limited by thermal noise of the highly reflective mirror coatings. Silicon nitride is an interesting material for such coatings as it shows very low mechanical loss, a property related to low thermal noise, which is known to further decrease under stress. Low optical absorption is also required to maintain the low mirror temperature. Here, we investigate the effect of stress on the optical properties at 1,550 nm of silicon nitride membranes attached to a silicon frame. Our approach includes the measurement of the thermal expansion coefficient and the thermal conductivity of the membranes. The membrane and frame temperatures are varied, and translated into a change in stress using finite element modeling. The resulting product of the optical absorption and thermo-optic coefficient (dn/dT) is measured using photothermal common-path interferometry