Internal thermal noise in the LIGO test masses: A direct approach

Abstract

The internal thermal noise in LIGO's test masses is analyzed by a new technique, a direct application of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem to LIGO's readout observable, x(t)=(longitudinal position of test-mass face, weighted by laser beam's Gaussian profile). Previous analyses, which relied on a normal-mode decomposition of the test-mass motion, were valid only if the dissipation is uniformally distributed over the test-mass interior, and they converged reliably to a final answer only when the beam size was a non-negligible fraction of the test-mass cross section. This paper's direct analysis, by contrast, can handle inhomogeneous dissipation and arbitrary beam sizes. In the domain of validity of the previous analysis, the two methods give the same answer for Sx(f), the spectral density of thermal noise, to within expected accuracy. The new analysis predicts that thermal noise due to dissipation concentrated in the test mass's front face (e.g., due to mirror coating) scales as 1/r02, by contrast with homogeneous dissipation, which scales as 1/r0 (r0 is the beam radius); so surface dissipation could become significant for small beam sizes.

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