Advanced Virgo is an upgrade to the Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy designed with an ultimate goal of the detection of gravitational waves originating from cosmic sources. The upgrade will provide an order of magnitude increase in the sensitivity of the detector and allow the exploration of a volume 1,000 times larger than Virgo. The system design includes 21 ‘half meter’ class optics for which Zygo has been selected as the primary supplier. The optic components have nanometer level low-order figure requirements along with sub-angstrom roughness requirements specified over a wide spatial frequency band. In this paper the results and methodologies used in achieving such extreme requirements that are typically associated with the semiconductor lithography industry will be presented.

Date Published: 18 August 2014
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9203, Interferometry XVII: Techniques and Analysis, 92030X (18 August 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2062229

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9203:
Interferometry XVII: Techniques and Analysis
Katherine Creath; Jan Burke; Joanna Schmit, Editor(s)