The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) opened a new window on the Universe in 2015 with the first direct detection of gravitational waves from a binary black hole system. This was the culmination of several decades of work on precision instrumentation to battle the fundamental noise sources including seismic, thermal and quantum noise, in addition to the hundreds of sources of technical noise.

In this talk I will cover my work on building seismic isolation and suspension systems for aLIGO. The 40kg mirror is hung from 7 stages of active/passive isolation to provide seismic reduction down to 10mHz, and the final mirror suspension is entirely suspended on fused silica glass fibres to minimise thermal noise. I will also give some views on the future direction of the field, including work towards LIGO India.