English

Long-range fiber-optic earthquake sensing by active phase noise cancellation

Geophysics 2023-05-03 v1 Computational Physics Instrumentation and Detectors Optics

Abstract

We present a long-range fiber-optic environmental deformation sensor based on active phase noise cancellation (PNC) in metrological frequency dissemination. PNC sensing exploits recordings of a compensation frequency that is commonly discarded. Without the need for dedicated measurement devices, it operates synchronously with metrological services, suggesting that existing phase-stabilized metrological networks can be co-used effortlessly as environmental sensors. The compatibility of PNC sensing with inline amplification enables the interrogation of cables with lengths beyond 1000 km, making it a potential contributor to earthquake detection and early warning in the oceans. Using spectral-element wavefield simulations that accurately account for complex cable geometry, we compare observed and computed recordings of the compensation frequency for a magnitude 3.9 earthquake in south-eastern France and a 123 km fiber link between Bern and Basel, Switzerland. The match in both phase and amplitude indicates that PNC sensing can be used quantitatively, for example, in earthquake detection and characterization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.01468,
  title  = {Long-range fiber-optic earthquake sensing by active phase noise cancellation},
  author = {Sebastian Noe and Dominik Husmann and Nils Müller and Jacques Morel and Andreas Fichtner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.01468},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:23:31.031Z