Dislocation movement and hysteresis in Maraging blades

Abstract

All seismic isolation systems developed for gravitational-wave interferometric detectors, such as LIGO, Virgo and TAMA, make use of Maraging steel blades. The dissipation properties of these blades have been studied at low frequencies, by using a geometric anti-spring (GAS) filter, which allowed the exploration of resonant frequencies below 100 mHz. At this frequency an anomalous transfer function was observed in the GAS filter: this is one of several motivations for this work. The many unexpected effects observed and measured are explainable by the collective movement of dislocations inside the material described with the statistic of self-organised criticality. At low frequencies, below 200 mHz, the dissipation mechanism can subtract elasticity from the system even leading to sudden collapse. While Young's modulus is weaker, excess dissipation is observed. At higher frequencies the applied stress is probably too fast to allow the full growth of dislocation avalanches, and less losses are observed, thus explaining the higher Q-factor in this frequency range. The domino effect that leads to the release of entangled dislocations allows the understanding of the random walk of the Virgo and TAMA inverted pendula, the anomalous GAS filter transfer function as well as the loss of predictability of the ring-down decay in the LIGO seismic attenuation system inverted pendula.