My buddy in college was working on reducing thermal noise in the suspension of the mirrors by growing a single crystal suspension string as the thermal vibrations in a metallic wire were enough to throw the experiment completely out of wack (they went on to use different approaches but the story was alway fun as he had to fly with a giant briefcase to transport them to LIGO)
huh. many days I feel like I went into the wrong fields (biophysics and then CS). growing and installing single crystal suspension springs sounds awesome. (of course I'm sure 90% is miserable)