The project will be supervised by professor Innocenzo Pinto at the University of Sannio (Unisannio).

Prof. Pinto is a Full Professor of Electromagnetics since 1990; Dean of the Engineering Faculty of Unisannio, and Fellow of the Optical Society of America “For fundamental contributions to thermal noise reduction in the mirror coatings of the LIGO interferometric gravitational wave detectors, and for original contributions to the science of Electromagnetics.”

Prof. Pinto is a PI of the Ligo-Virgo Scientific Collaboration (LVC) since 2005, and a member of the Japanese KAGRA Collaboration.

The research group led by Prof. Pinto has a coating laboratory for the production of high quality optical thin films designed by the group for the LIGO and Virgo mirrors.

The study developed at Unisannio by the MIT student will focus on understanding how the LIGO mirror coatings are made and characterized, with special focus on nm-layered composite films.

During the Externship the MIT student will visit the Virgo detector in Cascina, and other University Labs in Italy collaborating with Prof. Pinto’s group on coating research.

Among these, the material science Laboratories in the Physics Department of Salerno University (54 miles south of Benevento) and the CNR-IMM Laboratories in Naples and Lecce, where the optical films are characterized using TEM, AFM, XRD, Raman and Ellipsometric facilities,

The group led by Prof. Pinto at Unisannio is composed by : Innocenzo M. Pinto (full professor), Vincenzo Galdi, Vincenzo Pierro and Giuseppe Castaldi (associate professors), Maria Principe (postdoc fellow), Josh Neilson and Helena Mejuto-Villa (PhD Students).

RELEVANT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Magnozzi, M.; Terreni, S.; Anghinolfi, L.; Uttiya, S.; Carnasciali, M. M.; Gemme, G.; Neri, M.; Principe, M.; Pinto, I.; Kuo, L.-C.; Chao, S.; Canepa, M., “Optical properties of amorphous SiO2-TiO2 multi-nanolayered coatings for 1064-nm mirror technology,” Optical Materials 75 (2018) 94.

E. Cesarini, M. Lorenzini, R. Cardarelli, S. Chao, E. Coccia, V. Fafone, Y. Minenkov, I. Nardecchia, I.M. Pinto, A. Rocchi, V. Sequino, C. Taranto, “Measurement of acoustic losses in nanolayered coating developed for thermal noise reduction,” Int. J. Mat. Met. Eng. 10 (2016) 597.

Shiuh Chao, huang-wei Pan, Ling-chi Kuo, Vincenzo Pierro, Maria Principe, Innocenzo Pinto, and Riccardo DeSalvo, “nm-Layered Glassy Oxide Composites for 3rd Generation Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors,” Proc. OSA-OIC 2016, paper MB.10 (2016).

Maria Principe, “Reflective coating optimization for interferometric detectors of gravitational waves,” Optics Express, 23 (2015) 10938.

Maria Principe, Innocenzo M. Pinto, Vincenzo Pierro, Riccardo DeSalvo, Ilaria Taurasi, Akira E. Villar, Eric D. Black, Kenneth G. Libbrecht, Christophe Michel, Nazario Morgado, and Laurent Pinard, “Material loss angles from direct measurements of broadband thermal noise,” Phys. Rev. D 91 (2015) 022005

Huang-Wei Pan, Shun-Jin Wang, Ling-Chi Kuo, Shiuh Chao, Maria Principe, Innocenzo M. Pinto, and Riccardo DeSalvo, “Thickness-dependent crystallization on thermal anneal for titania/silica nm-layer composites deposited by ion beam sputter method,” Optics Express 22 (2014) 29847.

Akira E. Villar, Eric D. Black, Riccardo DeSalvo, Kenneth G. Libbrecht, Christophe Michel, Nazario Morgado, Laurent Pinard, Innocenzo M. Pinto, Vincenzo Pierro, Vincenzo Galdi, Maria Principe, and Ilaria Taurasi, “Measurement of thermal noise in multilayer coatings with optimized layer thickness,” Phys. Rev. D 81 (2010) 122001.

Innocenzo M. Pinto, Maria Principe, Riccardo DeSalvo, “Reflectivity and Thickness Optimization,” Ch. 10 in “Optical Coatings and Thermal Noise in Precision Measurements”, Gregg Harry et al., Editors, Cambridge University Press (2010).

Andri M. Gretarsson, Gregory Harry, David Ottaway, Juri Agresti, Helena Armandula, Riccardo DeSalvo, Phil Willems, Iain Martin, Stuart Reid, Peter Murray, Sheila Rowan, Jim Hough, Martin Fejer, Roger Route, Steven Penn, Innocenzo Pinto, Vincenzo Galdi, Giuseppe Castaldi, and Vincenzo Pierro, “Progress and Challenges Developing a Coating for Next Generation Gravitational-wave Detectors,” Proc. OSA-OIC 2007, paper ThC10 (2007).

Juri Agresti; Giuseppe Castaldi; Riccardo DeSalvo; Vincenzo Galdi; Vincenzo Pierro; Innocenzo M. Pinto “Optimized multilayer dielectric mirror coatings for gravitational wave interferometers,” SPIE Proceedings vol 6286 (2006).