Mechanical Ringdown Studies of Large-Area Substrate-Transferred GaAs/AlGaAs Crystalline Coatings

Abstract: We investigated elastic loss in GaAs/AlGaAs multilayers to help determine the suitability of these coatings for future gravitational wave detectors. We measured large ($\approx 70$-mm diameter) substrate-transferred crystalline coating samples with an improved substrate polish and bonding method. The elastic loss, when decomposed into bulk and shear contributions, was shown to arise entirely from the bulk loss, $\phi_{\mathrm{Bulk}} = (5.33 \pm 0.03)\times 10^{-4}$, with $\phi_{\mathrm{Shear}} = (0.0 \pm 5.2) \times 10^{-7}$. These results predict the coating loss of an 8-mm diameter coating in a 35-mm long cavity with a 250-$\mu$m spot size (radius) to be $\phi_{\mathrm{coating}} = (4.78 \pm 0.05) \times 10^{-5}$, in agreement with the published result from direct thermal noise measurement of $\phi_{\mathrm{coating}} = (4 \pm 4) \times 10^{-5}$. Bonding defects were shown to have little impact on the overall elastic loss.