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Published November 21, 2010 | public
Journal Article

Effect of heat treatment on mechanical dissipation in Ta_2O_5 coatings

Abstract

Thermal noise arising from mechanical dissipation in dielectric reflective coatings is expected to critically limit the sensitivity of precision measurement systems such as high-resolution optical spectroscopy, optical frequency standards and future generations of interferometric gravitational wave detectors. We present measurements of the effect of post-deposition heat treatment on the temperature dependence of the mechanical dissipation in ion-beam sputtered tantalum pentoxide between 11 K and 300 K. We find that the temperature dependence of the dissipation is strongly dependent on the temperature at which the heat treatment was carried out, and we have identified three dissipation peaks occurring at different heat treatment temperatures. At temperatures below 200 K, the magnitude of the loss was found to increase with higher heat treatment temperatures, indicating that heat treatment is a significant factor in determining the level of coating thermal noise.

Additional Information

© 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd. Received 27 July 2010, in final form 21 September 2010 Published 27 October 2010. We are grateful for the financial support provided by STFC, the University of Glasgow, EPSRC, the German Science Foundation under contract SFB Transregio 7 and the National Science Foundation under grants PHY-07 57896 and PHY-05 02641 (Stanford) and NSF-0653590 (HWS). IWM and SR are supported by an STFC Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Fellowship respectively. RN acknowledges the support of the FP7 EU Einstein Telescope design study project under contract number 211743. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation and operates under cooperative agreement PHY-0107417. We would like to thank our colleagues in the LSC and VIRGO collaborations and within SUPA for their interest in this work. This paper has LIGO Document Number LIGO-P1000074.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023