Orthogonal ribbons for suspending test masses in interferometric gravitational wave detectors

We show that a simple modification of proposed ribbon suspensions for laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors can substantially reduce the amplitude of violin modes at the expense of a small deterioration of suspension thermal noise. Using low loss fused silica, large amplitude peaks which cause dynamic range problems can be reduced by 21 dB. The total number of horizontal longitudinal direction violin modes below 5 kHz is reduced to less than half that expected with conventional ribbon suspensions.