Speaker
Description
The development of thin-film coatings with lower mechanical losses is of critical importance for the performance of future generations of interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. Significant experimental effort has led to improvements during these years and currently the most advanced technology is the one of amorphous coatings. Yet, there is still a lack of fundamental understanding of the involved dissipation mechanisms. Atomic modeling and simulations can play an important role in elucidating the physical processes and guiding the choices of optimal coating materials. In this work we study dissipation in glasses applying the experimental protocol of mechanical spectroscopy to atomistic simulations. First, we validate this approach on current coating materials, for which our results exhibit impressive agreement with the existing experimental data. Then we investigate prospective materials, which are potential candidates as a possible solution for the reduction of mechanical losses.
