To capitalize on this, the LIGO experimenters actually direct the laser beams to bounce back and forth between mirrors at opposite ends of each tube more than a hundred times on each run, increasing the roundtrip distance being monitored to about 800 kilometers per beam. With such clever tricks and engineering feats, LIGO should be able to detect any change in the tube lengths that exceeds a trillionth of the thickness of a human hair—a hundred millionth the size of an atom.
