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The high mechanical losses of the multilayer reflecting coating deposited on the mirror surface account for the main contribution to the thermal noise, limiting the sensitivity in the mid-frequency region of the detection band of the future gravitational waves detectors. Several European laboratories of the Virgo Collaboration have joined their efforts to improve the coating mechanical performances. The research lines of this collaboration are all focused on amorphous coatings, which represent a viable solution for the future GW detector generations. The main target is to find a way to reduce by a factor three the mechanical losses of the coating for the next generation of room temperature operating detectors. Some activities are also meant to be relevant for cryogenic operations. The status of this collaborative work will be described as well as the latest results of the different research lines.

The LIGO and the Virgo collaborations have recently announced the first detections of Gravitational Waves. Due to their weak amplitude, Gravitational Waves are expected to produce a very small effect on free-falling masses, which undergo a displacement of the order of 10 -18 m for a Km-scale mutual distance. This discovery showed that interferometric detectors are suitable to reveal such a feeble effect, and therefore represent a new tool for astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology in the understanding of the Universe. To better reconstruct the position of the Gravitational Wave source and increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the events by means of multiple coincidence, a network of detectors is necessary. In the USA, the LIGO project has recently concluded its second Observation Run (O2) with a couple of twin 4 kilometer-long arms detectors which are placed in Washington State and Louisiana. Advanced VIRGO (AdV) is a 3 kilometer-long arms second generation interferometer situated in Cascina, near Pisa in Italy. The installation of AdV has been completed in 2016, and the first commissioning phase allowed to get to the target early-stage sensitivity, which was sufficient to join LIGO in the O2 scientific run. In this paper, the challenges of the commissioning of AdV will be presented, together with its current performances and future perspectives. Finally, in the last paragraph the latest discoveries that occurred after the ICNFP 2017 conference will be also described.

In order to reduce the suspension thermal noise, the second generation GW interferometric detectors will employ monolithic suspensions in fused silica to hold the mirrors. The fibres are produced by melting and pulling apart a fused silica rod, obtaining a long thin wire with two thicker heads. The dynamics of such a fibre is in principle different from that of a cylindrical, regular fibre, because most of the deformation energy is stored in the neck region where the diameter is variable. This is an advantage, since adjusting the neck tapering, a thermoelastic noise cancellation effect can be obtained. Therefore, a careful study of the suspensions behavior is necessary to estimate the overall noise and to optimize the control strategy. To simplify the control design, a simple three segment model for the silica fibres has been developed, fully equivalent to the beam equation at low frequencies. The model, analytically proved for a regular cylindrical fibre, can be extended to a fibre with tapered necks, provided that the equivalent bending length is suitably measured. We developed a tool to measure the position of the bending point for each fibre, thus allowing to experimentally check the validity of the model. A numerical code has been written to solve the beam equation for wires with varying diameter. This code confirms the validity of the three segment model. Moreover, it is possible to extend the solution to higher frequencies thus computing the transfer function and the energy distribution of the suspension system and estimating the thermal noise contribution.

We present results from directed searches for continuous gravitational waves from a sample of 15 nearby supernova remnants, likely hosting young neutron star candidates, using data from the first eight months of the fourth observing run (O4) of the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA Collaboration. The analysis employs five pipelines: four semicoherent methods—the Band-Sampled-Data directed pipeline, Weave, and two Viterbi pipelines (single- and dual-harmonic)—and PyStoch, a cross-correlation-based pipeline. These searches cover wide frequency bands and do not assume prior knowledge of the targets’ ephemerides. No evidence of a signal is found from any of the 15 sources. We set 95% confidence-level upper limits on the intrinsic strain amplitude, with the most stringent constraints reaching ∼4 × 10−26 near 300 Hz for the nearby source G266.2−1.2 (Vela Jr.). We also derive limits on neutron star ellipticity and r-mode amplitudes for the same source, with the best constraints reaching ≲10−7 and ≲10−5, respectively, at frequencies above 400 Hz. For frequencies above 200 Hz, these results represent the most sensitive wide-band directed searches for continuous gravitational waves from supernova remnants to date.

A direct approach to reduce the thermal noise contribution to the sensitivity limit of a GW interferometric detector is the cryogenic cooling of the mirrors and mirrors suspensions. Future generations of detectors are foreseen to implement this solution. Silicon has been proposed as a candidate material, thanks to its very low intrinsic loss angle at low temperatures and due to its very high thermal conductivity, allowing the heat deposited in the mirrors by high power lasers to be efficiently extracted. To accomplish such a scheme, both mirror masses and suspension elements must be made of silicon, then bonded together forming a quasi-monolithic stage. Elements can be assembled using hydroxide-catalysis silicate bonding, as for silica monolithic joints. The effect of Si to Si bonding on suspension thermal conductance has therefore to be experimentally studied. A measurement of the effect of silicate bonding on thermal conductance carried out on 1 inch thick silicon bonded samples, from room temperature down to 77 K, is reported. In the explored temperature range, the silicate bonding does not seem to affect in a relevant way the sample conductance.

The Advanced Virgo interferometer is the upgraded version of the Virgo detector having the goal to extend by a factor 10 the observation horizon in the universe and consequently increase the detection rate by three orders of magnitude. Its installation is in progress and is expected to be completed in late 2015. In this proceeding we will present the scheme and the main challenging technical features of the detector and we will give an outline of the installation status and the foreseen time schedule which will bring Advanced Virgo to its full operation.

The Low Frequency Facility consists of a 1 cm Fabry-Perot cavity suspended to a single SuperAttenuator, which is the mechanical system adopted to isolate the test masses of the Virgo interferometer. In this paper we present the preliminary results of measurements performed with a cavity of finesse 4000 and lasting 1-2 hours in different working conditions. The analysis presented here is focused mainly on the region below 100 Hz, and uses data collected with longitudinal control bandwidth below 150 Hz. A calibration test confirmed that the collected data are in good agreement with the model of the longitudinal control loop based on the open loop measurements. In addition to this, above 2 Hz the power spectrum of the two mirrors relative displacement shows a stationary noise floor and few peaks with high mechanical quality factor. Studying these peaks in the time domain, it has been observed that the energy associated with a single peak is Boltzman distributed, whether the oscillations are not excited. The measured upper limit of the seismic noise contamination at 10 Hz is around 2 × 10−14 m/ Hz.

The data collected by a gravitational wave interferometer are inevitably affected by instrumental artefacts and environmental disturbances. In particular, for continuous gravitational wave (CW) studies it is important to detect narrow-band disturbances (the so-called \"noise lines\") during science runs, and to help scientists to identify and possibly remove or mitigate their sources. The NoEMi (Noise Frequency Event Miner) framework exploits some of the algorithms implemented for the CW search to identify, on a daily basis, the frequency lines observed in the Virgo science data and in a subset of the environmental sensors, looking for lines that match in frequency. A line tracker algorithm reconstructs the lines over time, and stores them in a database, which is made accesible via a web interface. We describe the workflow of NoEMi, providing examples of its use for the investigation of noise lines in past Virgo runs (VSR2, VSR3) and in the most recent run (VSR4).

The understanding of noise in interferometric gravitational wave detectors is fundamental in terms of both enabling prompt reactions in the mitigation of noise disturbances and in the establishment of appropriate data-cleaning strategies. Monitoring tools to perform online and offline noise analysis in areas such as transient signal detection, line identification algorithms and coherence are used to characterise the Virgo detector noise. In this paper, we describe the framework into which these tools are integrated - the Noise Monitor Application Programming Interface (NMAPI) - and provide examples of its application.