A tool for measuring the bending length in thin wires.

Great effort is currently being put into the development and construction of the second generation, advanced gravitational wave detectors, Advanced Virgo and Advanced LIGO. The development of new low thermal noise suspensions of mirrors, based on the experience gained in the previous experiments, is part of this task. Quasi-monolithic suspensions with fused silica wires avoid the problem of rubbing friction introduced by steel cradle arrangements by directly welding the wires to silica blocks bonded to the mirror. Moreover, the mechanical loss level introduced by silica (φfs ∼ 10(-7) in thin fused silica wires) is by far less than the one associated with steel. The low frequency dynamical behaviour of the suspension can be computed and optimized, provided that the wire bending shape under pendulum motion is known. Due to the production process, fused silica wires are thicker near the two ends (necks), so that analytical bending computations are very complicated. We developed a tool to directly measure the low frequency bending parameters of fused silica wires, and we tested it on the wires produced for the Virgo+ monolithic suspensions. The working principle and a set of test measurements are presented and explained.

A "gentle" nodal suspension for measurements of the acoustic attenuation in materials.

Loss angle measurements in ultralow mechanical loss materials is normally affected by a large systematic error due to the excess losses introduced by the suspension system used to hold the samples. Crystals such as sapphire and silicon or amorphous materials such as fused silica can have loss angles in the range of 10(-10)-10(-7); such materials are of extreme interest in the detection of small displacements as it is required in quantum measurements, frequency stabilization, Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), and gravitational wave research. In the system proposed here the sample is suspended in equilibrium on top of a sphere, touching on one of the nodal points of vibration. The advantage of this system, as compared to others used so far, is twofold: (i) one surface only of the sample is touched and the contact surface is minimized because of the absence of applied forces; (ii) some relevant parameters of the suspension can be measured and eventually varied, giving the experimentalist the possibility to identify whether the measured loss is limited by the suspension system in use or it is an intrinsic property of the sample under investigation. The measurements of a 75 mm diameter and 3 mm thickness disk of Suprasil 311 gave a loss angle phi of 5x10(-8).