The goal of this project is to maximise the sensitivity of advanced GW detectors by suppressing quantum noise, reducing coating losses and understanding and reducing control noises, thereby increasing the rate of detections by more than an order of magnitude. The advanced detectors include Advanced LIGO (aLIGO), the French/Italian observatory Advanced Virgo and the Japanese KAGRA detector. By mid 2020s, the new LIGO-India detector will be added to the network. We will make major contributions to this international effort to ensure our continuing priority access to exciting new astrophysical data, the bedrock upon which GW science is built.

We will focus on three key outcomes:

1. increasing the circulating power and the enhanced injection of squeezing to improve quantum noise limited sensitivity;

2. reducing the impact of coating thermal noise in the mid-frequency band; and

3. reducing the impact of control noise and unknown noise sources in the 10 Hz to 100 Hz band.