A method for the experimental measurement of bulk and shear loss angles in amorphous thin films

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to measure bulk and shear loss angles separately in amorphous thin films, crucial for reducing thermal noise in high-precision measurements like gravitational-wave detection.

Contribution

It presents a novel experimental approach to distinguish bulk and shear loss angles, demonstrating their difference in titania-doped tantala used in gravitational-wave detectors.

Findings

Bulk and shear loss angles are distinct in titania-doped tantala.

The proposed method effectively extracts separate loss angles.

Data supports models with two different loss angles over a single one.

Abstract

Brownian thermal noise is a limiting factor for the sensitivity of many high precision metrology applications, among other gravitational-wave detectors. The origin of Brownian noise can be traced down to internal friction in the amorphous materials that are used for the high reflection coatings. To properly characterize the internal friction in an amorphous material, one needs to consider separately the bulk and shear losses. In most of previous works the two loss angles were considered equal, although without any first principle motivation. In this work we present a method that can be used to extract the material bulk and shear loss angles, based on current state-of-the-art coating ring-down measurement systems. We also show that for titania-doped tantala, a material commonly used in gravitational-wave detector coatings, the experimental data strongly favor a model with two different and distinct loss angles, over the simpler case of one single loss angle.