High Throughput Structure Determination for Low Thermal Noise Coatings

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This award supports research in relativity and relativistic astrophysics and it addresses the priority areas of NSF's "Windows on the Universe" Big Idea. The now weekly observations of gravitational waves from coalescing black holes and neutron stars by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo interferometers represent a new era of astrophysics, launched by the first detection four years ago. Planned upgrades to Advanced LIGO, in addition to planned future generations of international gravitational wave observatories, will seek to extend the range of the detectors and enable further discoveries within gravitational wave astronomy. However, all future detector upgrades and concepts rely on the development of new mirror coating materials to reduce thermal noise. The PI's group at Stanford has efforts devoted to theoretical and experimental studies to develop a better understanding of the structure of amorphous coatings to help guide the search for improved coatings with lower thermal noise. This research program will significantly enhance our ability to collect atomic structure data at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) in collaboration with SSRL scientists, and will accelerate our ability to find coating materials with lower thermal noise. Recent progress in determining lower thermal noise coatings has been realized from the determination of the atomic structure of amorphous oxide films through X-ray scattering methods at SSRL. This data is used as experimental input to molecular dynamics modeling to study the atomic structure, identify the mechanisms responsible for coating thermal noise, and identify ways of reducing their effects. The proposed program addresses the opportunity to develop, in conjunction with collaborators at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, an improved beamline at SSRL and with it initiate high-throughput Grazing-Incidence X-ray Pair Distribution Function (GIPDF) measurements to speed the rate at which we can recover structural information on new coating materials.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.