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Published April 7, 2012 | public
Journal Article

Seismic topographic scattering in the context of GW detector site selection

Abstract

In this paper, we present a calculation of seismic scattering from irregular surface topography in the Born approximation. Based on US-wide topographic data, we investigate topographic scattering at specific sites to demonstrate its impact on Newtonian-noise estimation and subtraction for future gravitational-wave detectors. We find that topographic scattering at a comparatively flat site in Oregon would not pose any problems, whereas scattering at a second site in Montana leads to significant broadening of wave amplitudes in wavenumber space that would make Newtonian-noise subtraction very challenging. Therefore, it is shown that topographic scattering should be included as criterion in the site-selection process of future low-frequency gravitational-wave detectors.

Additional Information

© 2012 Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd. Received 27 November 2011, in final form 3 February 2012. Published 14 March 2012. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the United States National Science Foundation for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory. MC's work was funded by the NSF through the California Institute of Technology's Summer Undergraduate Fund. The authors thank Jennifer Driggers, Vuk Mandic and Gary Pavlis for many helpful discussions about seismic scattering.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023