Silica research in Glasgow

The Glasgow group is involved in the construction of the GEO600 interferometer as well as in R&D activity on technology for advanced gravitational wave detectors. GEO600 will be the first GW detector using quasimonolithic silica suspensions in order to decrease thermal noise significantly with respect to steel wire suspensions. The results concerning GEO600 suspension mounting and performance will be shown in the first section. Section 2 is devoted to the present results from the direct measurement of thermal noise in mirrors mounted in the 10 m interferometer in Glasgow which has a sensitivity limit of 4 10 -19 m Hz -1/2 above 1 kHz. Section 3 presents results on the measurements of coating losses. R&D activity has been carried out to understand better how thermal noise in the suspensions affects the detector sensitivity, and in section 4 a discussion on the non-linear thermoelastic effect is presented.