-------- In message <1E75A9592178425ABD11390EB725D060@pc52>, "Tom Van Baak" writes:
>Yes, the interferometer is 4 km in length but they bounce the beam back >and forth 400 times so the effective length is more like 1600 km. They >keep the mirrors stationary to "picometers". They use hundreds of clever >tricks to pull this off. It's actually more amazing than that, each arm is a resonant cavity, so while the actual laser is only about 10W, they have about 20 kW of photons inflight at any one time. With 20 kiloWatt of light safety-glasses are not _that_ important any more. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
