Friday, October 28, 2011
Hall 1-2 (San Jose Convention Center)
Abstract: LIGO is currently being upgraded to Advanced LIGO, which will have ten times the range for astrophysical gravitational wave sources. The scatterometer at California State University Fullerton uses a horizontally polarized laser with a wavelength of 1064nm to investigate the reflective optics that may be used in Advanced LIGO and beyond. The best candidates for LIGOs setup are optics that have low scatter, which is measured using the Bidirectional Reflective Distribution Function (BRDF). We present a description of our experimental setup and BRDF measurements of sample gravitational-wave detector optics.