BETS

Brazilian Einstein Telescope Studies

Project

Scientific Goals

Tecnology

Brazilian collaboration

People

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Project

The Einstein Telescope is one of the leading European research projects with global scientific impact, and Italy is a candidate to host it in Sardinia in the area of the disused Sos Enattos mine in the area of Nuoro. It is a large underground facility for a third-generation gravitational wave detector, which will be able to observe a volume of the universe about one thousand times larger than current second-generation instruments, the LIGO interferometers in the United States and Virgo in Italy. In 2015, these scientific collaborations observed gravitational waves for the first time, predicted 100 years earlier by Albert Einstein, a discovery that was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.

Scientific goals

The Einstein Telescope is a fundamental research project and, therefore, its primary and overriding mission is scientific. Its goal is to study the universe with gravitational waves, through its history, tracing it back to the time when light appeared, to understand its origin, how it formed and evolved and what its future will be.

Tecnology

The Einstein Telescope will be a gravitational wave detector based on the successes of the laser interferometry technique used in the second-generation LIGO and Virgo experiments. However, its sensitivity will be greatly enhanced compared to current experiments by increasing the size of the detector and implementing new and innovative technologies.

The original design idea envisages a triangular-shaped detector with 10-kilometre sides. Along its underground arms, inside ultra-high vacuum tubes, laser beams will flow and will be reflected by highly polished mirrors, to be, finally, recombined and form, overlapping each other, the so-called interference pattern.

When a gravitational wave passes through the interferometer, the length of the arms oscillates and, as a result, the laser beams travelling inside them take paths of different lengths; therefore, the interference pattern obtained from their recombination changes. The ET will measure these changes, which are infinitesimal, a fraction of a billionth of an atom’s diameter. To make such precise measurements, the ET requires state-of-the-art technology, created ad hoc through research and development conducted by the research community together with industry. The scientific collaboration is currently studying the technologies that will be needed by the Einstein Telescope, its geometry and configuration.

In addition to a triangular-shaped interferometer, to be built on a single site, experts are also considering the possibility of the L-shaped configuration, such as that of current interferometers. In the latter case, the project would involve twin interferometers, such as the current U.S. interferometers, which would be built at two separate sites at a sufficient distance from each other. As a result, the effectiveness in locating the astrophysical source of the gravitational wave in the sky can be enhanced.

The Brazilian Collaboration: BETS

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