Cryogenic cooling of a sapphire mirror-suspension for interferometric gravitational wave detectors

Abstract The sensitivity of large-scale interferometric gravitational wave detectors currently under construction will be limited by thermal noise in the mirror-suspension system. Cryogenic cooling is made difficult because of the necessarily high laser power (5 kW) incident on the mirrors. An all sapphire system of high conductivity and low loss has been developed. Experiments confirm that mirrors for the TAMA detector could be cooled to as low as 14.5 K. This represents two orders of magnitude reduction in the mirror-suspension thermal noise energy.

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