8.3 Infinite mirrors, noise in coating
The dielectric coatings required to transform a polished blank of silica into a mirror are deposited by
successive layers and form a region at the reflecting surface whose mechanical parameters are different from
the bulk material. There is also a large difference for the loss angle
compared to the
substrate’s. We shall treat the coating as a layer of thickness
, having a specific Young’s modulus
and Poisson ratio
, and corresponding Lamé coefficients
. The coating is
assumed to be located in the region
, so that the interface substrate/coating
is located at
. For
, we have the expression (8.12) of the displacement vector
(with (
) possibly different from the preceding solution (8.18) at the end). The following
solution of the Navier–Cauchy equations for the displacement vector in the coating is easily found
But in the present case, the functions
and
are more complicated, taking into account two finite
boundaries
The four arbitrary constant
can be related to
and
of the preceding solution (8.12) by
requiring continuity of the displacements and of the pressure components at the interface
. Then the
boundary conditions are
which allow one to compute
and find the complete solution. The exact solution is complicated and
of little interest because we are in a case where
(tens of microns) is small compared to the
parameter of the beam (a few cm). A solution at first order in
is therefore sufficient.
We first find the energy stored in the bulk. It would be difficult to use the same method as
in the preceding case (a surface integral). Instead we use the definition of the energy density
We rewrite using the form
and we integrate over the volume
. It is easy to see that the
crossed term
does not contribute in an
integral, being the derivative of a function null at
and
. By using the closure relation
one finally obtains
with the notation
Note that, due to the Plancherel theorem (or to the closure relation in the direct space), this is also
Now the energy stored in the coating can be computed in the same way, by integrating the energy density
within the volume
. But at first order in
, it is
sufficient to take
and we find
where
(
takes the value 1 when
and
).
8.3.1 Coating Brownian thermal noise: LG modes
In the case of an
mode, we get
where
is a numerical factor. Table 16 gives some values of
.
Table 16: Some numerical values of 
|
m |
0 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
n |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
0 |
|
1 |
.50 |
.34 |
.27 |
.22 |
.19 |
1 |
|
.50 |
.31 |
.23 |
.19 |
.16 |
.14 |
2 |
|
.38 |
.25 |
.19 |
.16 |
.14 |
.12 |
3 |
|
.31 |
.21 |
.17 |
.14 |
.12 |
.11 |
4 |
|
.27 |
.19 |
.15 |
.13 |
.11 |
.10 |
5 |
|
.25 |
.17 |
.14 |
.12 |
.11 |
.10 |
|
The strain energy stored in the coating is
Thus, the ratio between the main energy in the substrate and that in the preceding coating is
A similar result has been also reported by [32] and [18] in the case of (
) at the limit
. For reasonable parameters,
is not so different from one. In the case of the Virgo cavity input
mirrors (Ex1), assuming a stack 25 µm thick, and elastic parameters (
,
),
and we get
and, for an
mode of width w = 3.5 cm (Ex3),
8.3.2 Coating Brownian thermal noise: Flat modes
The Fourier transform of the flat mode pressure was found in Section 3.1.3:
Thus, we have
and the coating strain energy is
with the ratio
now
For the flat mode of (Ex2), we find
Here are some numerical values for comparison. For the
mode, we have
4.14 m
,
For the flat mode (b = 9.1 cm), we have
6.12 m
(to be discarded, as the sharp edge effect
becomes spurious, see the next value),
4.52 m
(numerical integration), and for the
Gauss–Bessel mode of Figure 5, this is
3.56 m
. A value of 2.34 m
is reported by [4]
after an optimization process involving an expansion on LG modes. It is probably possible to have a not too
different result by a fine tuning of the conical mode’s parameters.