Crystal bell?
Also, sapphire has the lowest acoustic loss of any material. "It rings like a bell without losing energy," he said. Finally, the crystal has high thermal conductivity, so it doesn't deform when laser coatings on the surface absorb laser light. The team, led by L. Ju, reports in Applied Physical Letters that the use of sapphire beamsplitters in laser interferometer gravitational wave detectors results in lower noise optical losses and birefringence in these devices.
Projects such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) joint venture of the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could benefit from the improved performance. When fully developed, the technology would improve LIGO's sensitivity by up to 16 times, Blair said. Gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO can "see" cataclysmic events in the universe and explore the nature of gravity.
However, the team still has some concerns about the use of sapphire in laser interferometers. There are still uncertainties about whether larger sapphire samples required for large-scale applications can maintain the optical performance observed in the smaller-scale experiments.