INTERNAL THERMAL NOISE IN THE LIGO TEST MASSES - A DIRECT APPROACH

The internal thermal noise in LIGO's test masses is analyzed by a new technique, a direct application of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem to LIGO's readout observable, x(t)=(longitudinal position of test-mas s face, weighted by laser beam's Gaussian profile). Previous analyses, which relied on a normal-mode decomposition of the test-mass motion, were valid only if the dissipation is uniformally distributed over the test-mass interior, and they converged reliably to a final answer onl y when the beam size was a non-negligible fraction of the test-mass cr oss section. This paper's direct analysis, by contrast, can handle inh omogeneous dissipation and arbitrary beam sizes. In the domain of vali dity of the previous analysis, the two methods give the same answer fo r S-x(f), the spectral density of thermal noise, to within expected ac curacy. The new analysis predicts that thermal noise due to dissipatio n concentrated in the test mass's front face (e.g., due to mirror coat ing) scales as 1/r(0)(2), by contrast with homogeneous dissipation, wh ich scales as 1/r(0) (r(0) is the beam radius); so surface dissipation could become significant for small beam sizes.