Beyond Bragg-Mirrors for Gravitational Wave Telescopes: A Fabrication Tolerant Hybrid Metasurface-Bragg Mirror Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid metasurface-Bragg mirror design that is fabrication-tolerant, achieves high reflectance, and significantly reduces thermal noise in gravitational wave detector mirrors.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel hybrid mirror architecture combining metasurfaces and Bragg stacks, enhancing fabrication robustness and thermal noise performance.

Findings

Ideal metasurface exceeds 99.999% reflectance.

Fabrication uncertainties limit metasurface reflectance to about 99.9%.

Hybrid design achieves thermal displacement noise an order of magnitude below the noise budget.

Abstract

Coating thermal noise in high-reflectivity test-mass mirrors is a major limitation for future gravitational-wave detectors, especially in the 10--300 Hz band. ET-Pathfinder therefore requires mirror coatings that combine very high reflectance at 1.55 micrometer with low thermal noise under cryogenic conditions. Conventional dielectric Bragg mirrors provide high reflectance but require thick coatings, whereas metasurface mirrors can reduce coating-related noise but are limited by fabrication tolerances and line-edge roughness. We present a hybrid metasurface--Bragg mirror concept tailored to ET-Pathfinder. The design combines a fabrication-tolerant one-layer metasurface, an anti-resonant Fabry--Perot spacer, and a reduced dielectric Bragg stack. Optical performance is evaluated using full-wave electromagnetic simulations, while fabrication robustness is assessed with a truncated-Gaussian Monte Carlo analysis. Line-edge roughness is included as a systematic edge-smoothing effect. The resulting reflectance distributions are used to determine the minimum Bragg-stack support required to meet system-level specifications. The ideal metasurface exceeds 99.999% reflectance. When fabrication uncertainties and line-edge roughness are included, the metasurface reflectance is limited to about 99.9% at the 95% yield level. The remaining transmission can be compensated by a supporting Bragg stack with as few as seven layer pairs. For this configuration, the hybrid mirror achieves a total thermal displacement noise about one order of magnitude below the projected ET-Pathfinder coating-noise budget. These results show that fabrication-limited metasurface reflectance can be compensated within a hybrid architecture, enabling reduced coating thickness and thermal noise for next-generation gravitational-wave detectors.