High-sensitivity tool for studying phonon related mechanical losses in low loss materials

Understand

Fundamental mechanical loss mechanisms exist even in very pure materials, for instance, due to the interactions of excited acoustic waves with thermal phonons.

• A reduction of these losses in a certain frequency range is desired in high precision instruments like gravitational wave detectors.
• Systematic analyses of the mechanical losses in those low loss materials are essential for this aim, performed in a highly sensitive experimental set-up.
• Our novel method of mechanical spectroscopy, cryogenic resonant acoustic spectroscopy of bulk materials (CRA spectroscopy), is well suited to systematically determine losses at the resonant frequencies of the samples of less than 10^(-9) in the wide temperature range from 5 to 300 K.