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Losses in wire attachments

Graduate student Andri Gretarsson is following up Yinglei Huang's work on dissipation mechanisms in metal pendulum wires. Specifically, he will be attempting to cold-weld gold coated wires to gold plated prism edges on a test mass. Our hope is that the wire will bond strongly enough to the prism to eliminate sliding friction as a source of mechanical loss. If this succeeds it may show a path for an incremental improvement to the original LIGO suspension.



William Startin
Wed Aug 5 16:40:23 EDT 1998