Numerically modeling Brownian thermal noise in amorphous and crystalline thin coatings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a numerical tool to accurately model Brownian thermal noise in amorphous and crystalline thin coatings, aiding the development of more sensitive gravitational-wave detectors.

Contribution

A new open-source finite-element based numerical method for modeling thermal noise in crystalline and amorphous coatings, improving accuracy over approximate analytic solutions.

Findings

Crystalline coatings increase thermal noise by about 3% compared to amorphous ones.

The numerical model scales as expected and matches analytic solutions for amorphous materials.

The tool enables high-resolution simulations of thin reflective coatings for gravitational-wave detectors.

Abstract

Thermal noise is expected to be one of the noise sources limiting the astrophysical reach of Advanced LIGO (once commissioning is complete) and third-generation detectors. Adopting crystalline materials for thin, reflecting mirror coatings, rather than the amorphous coatings used in current-generation detectors, could potentially reduce thermal noise. Understanding and reducing thermal noise requires accurate theoretical models, but modeling thermal noise analytically is especially challenging with crystalline materials. Thermal noise models typically rely on the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, which relates the power spectral density of the thermal noise to an auxiliary elastic problem. In this paper, we present results from a new, open-source tool that numerically solves the auxiliary elastic problem to compute the Brownian thermal noise for both amorphous and crystalline coatings. We employ open-source frameworks to solve the auxiliary elastic problem using a finite-element method, adaptive mesh refinement, and parallel processing that enables us to use high resolutions capable of resolving the thin reflective coating. We compare with approximate analytic solutions for amorphous materials, and we verify that our solutions scale as expected. Finally, we model the crystalline coating thermal noise in an experiment reported by Cole and collaborators (2013), comparing our results to a simpler numerical calculation that treats the coating as an "effectively amorphous" material. We find that treating the coating as a cubic crystal instead of as an effectively amorphous material increases the thermal noise by about 3%. Our results are a step toward better understanding and reducing thermal noise to increase the reach of future gravitational-wave detectors. (Abstract abbreviated.)