¶ Pizzicato
Pizzicato is a glitch that we have been seeing more recently (starting ER14) at both the Hanford and Livingston detectors, although the majority of these glitches occur at the Livingston detector. Pizzicato is a short (~0.05 s), flying saucer shaped high energy burst centered around either 500 Hz, 1000 Hz, or in rare cases, both. These glitches usually have a small hole in their centers, and will sometimes also have a “tractor beam” below them - much like a UFO beaming up a cow! Similar looking glitches resembling very loud versions of Pizzicato have been categorized in the past as Church
We are not exactly sure yet what causes these glitches, but because of the frequency that they occur at, we are confident that they are related to the violin modes (vibrations of the fibers used to suspend our test masses) or our violin mode damping mechanisms.
Go here to read about how we went about looking into this glitch!
¶ Examples
.png)
.png)
.png)