Earthquakes

tullio
tullio
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Topic 191511

Which would be the effect of an earthquake om LIGO, GEO600, VIRGO and other laser interferometers? Could they be used to monitor distant earthquakes?
Tullio

debugas
debugas
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Earthquakes

Quote:
Which would be the effect of an earthquake om LIGO, GEO600, VIRGO and other laser interferometers? Could they be used to monitor distant earthquakes?
Tullio


earthquake is a very large and big wave and what we are looking for are very short and fast spikes. So the answer is no

Joachim Schmidt
Joachim Schmidt
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But you could use the

But you could use the interferometer to monitor earthquakes if you want to :)

Barrie
Barrie
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Not really relevant, but I

Not really relevant, but I like to look at recent earthquake activity here

Dead men don't get the baby washed. HTH

David Hammer
David Hammer
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RE: Not really relevant,

Message 41428 in response to message 41427

Quote:
Not really relevant, but I like to look at recent earthquake activity here

Actually that link is quite relevant. That earthquake page is one the main webpages that we use for tracking down sources of problems in the IFO (like losing lock). As it happens I just spent a week down at LIGO Livingston observatory as a Scimon so tracking earthquakes was one of my jobs. There are a lot of earthquakes in Alaska that have an effect on the IFOs but if there is a earthquake bigger that 5.0 it will likely have an effect no matter where it is. There are several seismometers at the LIGO sites that make it very easy to know when an earthquake is affecting the data.

Quote:
Which would be the effect of an earthquake om LIGO, GEO600, VIRGO and other laser interferometers? Could they be used to monitor distant earthquakes?

Earthquakes will cause the sensitivity of the IFOs to go down and sometimes even break lock, but the IFOs are built so the earthquakes and other sources of noise have as little impact on the data as possible. They are very poor earthquake detectors.

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