Yun-Long Sun , Yan-Xia Ye , Xiao-Hui Shi, Zhi-Yuan Wang, Chun-Jie Yan, Lei-Lei He, Ze-Huang Lu and Jie Zhang

MOE Key Laboratory of Fundamental Physical Quantities Measurements, Hubei Key Laboratory of Gravitation and Quantum Physics, PGMF and School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, People’s Republic of China

E-mail: yxye@hust.edu.cn and jie.zhang@mail.hust.edu.cn

Received 16 December 2018, revised 23 March 2019 Accepted for publication 11 April 2019
Published 26 April 2019

Abstract

The third-generation gravitational wave detectors under development will be operating at cryogenic temperature to reduce the thermal noise. Silicon and sapphire are promising candidate materials for the test masses and suspension elements due to their remarkable mechanical and thermal properties at cryogenic temperature. Here we present the performances of the cryogenic thermal cycling and strength testing on hydroxide catalysis bonding between sapphire and silicon. Our results suggest that although these two materials have very different coefficients of thermal expansion, if the flatness and the thermally grown SiO2 oxidation layer on the silicon surface are controlled well, the bonded samples can still survive thermal cycling from room temperature to 5.5 K. A breaking strength of 3.6 ± 0.6 MPa is measured for the bonds between sapphire and silicon with a 190 nm silicon oxidation thickness after cooling cycle. We construct a hybrid sapphire-silicon Fabry–Perot cavity with our bonding technique. The measurement results reveal that the cavity can survive repeated thermal cycling while maintaining a finesse of 5.6 × 105.