Jumping for Science – A Flash Mob Experiment at CFEL
On Monday January 20, we turned the CFEL building on the DESY campus into the site of an unusual and exciting experiment. At exactly 12:13 PM, we invited everyone present in the CFEL cafeteria to join us for a quick jumping session to the rhythm of a well-known song. (Can you guess which one? 😉)
The goal? To test the sensitivity of the WAVE fiber-optic network, a cutting-edge distributed acoustic sensing system designed to detect seismic vibrations with exceptional precision. We wanted to see if the combined jumping of a small group of people could generate vibrations detectable of WAVE in the PETRA ring, located close by, or even beyond?
In the following Figure we show the waterfall plot from the WAVE network, thus time on the vertical and position along the fiber on the vertical axis. The signal (50 second jumping: Thank you to all the hungry people in the line) we generated is clearly visible after applying a low pass filter to the data. The results offer a glimpse into how even small-scale human activity can be measured and analyzed using this advanced technology.
In the following spectrogram you can see that the main frequencies, that we were observing in the data, are around 2Hz. The is the jumping frequency of the people, so the beat of the song.
We’ll be repeating this experiment at the ET German Community Meeting in Hamburg this Friday January 31st between 11:35AM and 12:00PM again at CFEL. Then, also using the correct low pass filter in the livestream to make the signal more clear. But maybe you can find the signal also in the clip of the last Livestream?
