Speaker
Description
Seismic noise, the vibration of the terrestrial environment, is an omnipresent problem for high precision experiments. Research facilities in urban areas must consider the local seismic noise floor,but even experiments in remote locations, especially highly sensitive gravitational wave detectors, require good compensation for seismic noise. As part of the project SeiSmart, we are working on addressing the conceptual and physical limitations of real-time seismic noise prediction to enable effective compensation in high-precision measurements. The gravitational wave detection group at the University of Hamburg operates a test environment for small scale studies of gravitational wave detector components. The test environment consists of a vacuum chamber standing on active isolation feet with a passively isolated optical table inside. One seismometer is mounted on top of the optical table in the chamber monitoring the movement of the table while another seismometer monitors ground motion on the floor next to the chamber. The setup is complemented by the WAVE distributed acoustic sensing network providing densely spaced seismo-acoustic measurements in the vicinity of the test environment. Using this infrastructure, we are working on characterizing the urban ambient seismic noise field and cataloging the sources responsible for seismic disturbances at the test environment. We will present the current status of our work showcasing the potential sources to be used for ground motion prediction in different frequency bands from 0.1 to 50 Hz based on spectral and coherence analysis.