On 23 and 24 July, the pop superstar Taylor Swift play two engagements at the Volksparkstadion near the DESY campus in Hamburg. Her fans, the “Swifties”, will be sure to be jumping and dancing to the rhythms of her enormous number of hits. They’ve even been known to cause small movements in the earth – “SwiftQuakes”. Instrumentation at DESY can pick up such movements – and scientists on the Hamburg campus will be listening in, even if they didn’t manage to grab tickets.

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Die 19.000 Sensoren von WAVE helfen den Wissenschaftlern bei der Überwachung von Erdbewegungen, die ihre Daten in den Anlagen PETRA III und European XFEL beeinträchtigen könnten. Das bedeutet auch, dass bestimmte Ereignisse wie Popkonzerte oder die EM-Spiele in den Daten 'gesehen' werden könnten. (Bild: WAVE-Collaboration)

The instruments involved both use signals of light to make their measurements, and one of them even aims to catch such vibrations. WAVE is a seismic and geo-acoustic measurement network in and around DESY and the Science City Hamburg Bahrenfeld. The vibrations generated by the Taylor Swift concerts taking place two kilometres away can be recorded with the available sensors. Researchers from the network will offer a live stream of the measured seismic signals on both days.

“Geophysicists have already measured the waves generated by Taylor Swift concerts in various countries, but Science City has a measurement network with a unique resolution,” explains Céline Hadziioannou, Professor of Seismology at Universität Hamburg and member of the WAVE coordination team.

The network uses fiber optic cables as seismic sensors. WAVE comprises a total of 19 kilometers of fiber optic cable, which corresponds to 19,000 sensors. These make it possible to record ground movement data at a previously unattainable density over long distances. The sensors run through the PETRA III and European XFEL tunnels, and they help scientists counter the natural and manmade vibrations that can affect experiments at both facilities.

In addition to Hadziioannou and Universität Hamburg physics professor and gravitational waves expert Oliver Gerberding, the network is coordinated by Katharina-Sophie Isleif, a Professor of Physics and Metrology at Helmut Schmidt University, and Holger Schlarb, a scientist at DESY. Researchers from the European XFEL and the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam are also involved.

In addition, the “light shining through a wall” experiment ALPS II is able to pick up the SwiftQuakes. ALPS II uses an extremely precisely positioned laser beam to attempt to find ultralight candidate particles of dark matter, which are thought to convert to particles of light in extreme magnetic fields.

“The experiment is built to search for dark matter, but it is so sensitive that it can pick up ground noise from more than a kilometre away – including a pop concert,” says Todd Kozlowski, postdoc in the ALPS II collaboration. ALPS II has read signals from the Volksparkstadion before: during the four games hosted in Hamburg at the European Football Championships this year, the instruments could even pick out the massive fan reaction when a goal was scored.

Do you not have tickets for the concert? Then WAVE has you somewhat covered – maybe you can’t hear the songs, but you can see how the Swifties react. A livestream of the data coming out of WAVE will run on the gaming livestream platform Twitch: https://m.twitch.tv/wave_hamburg/home.