Toward a third generation of gravitational wave observatories

Abstract

Large gravitational wave interferometric detectors, like Virgo and LIGO, demonstrated the capability to reach their design sensitivity, but to transform these machines into an effective observational instrument for gravitational wave astronomy a large improvement in sensitivity is required. Advanced detectors in the near future and third generation observatories in slightly more than one decade will open the possibility to perform gravitational wave astronomical observations from the Earth. An overview of the technological progress needed to realize a third generation observatory, like the Einstein Telescope (ET), and a possible evolution scenario are discussed in this paper.

Cosmology with the Einstein telescope: No Slip Gravity model and redshift specifications

“…The achieved sensitivity by the first generation of interferometric detectors (LIGO (Abbott et al 2009), Virgo (Acernese et al 2008), GEO 600 (Grote 2008), and TAMA (Takahashi 2004)) was mainly limited by shot noise, mirror thermal noise, and seismic noise, while for the second-generation GW detectors, such as Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) (Harry 2010), Advanced Virgo (AdV) (Acernese et al 2015), KAGRA (Somiya 2012;Aso et al 2013), and LIGO-India (Unnikrishnan 2013) additional fundamental noise sources (such as, photon radiation pressure noise and thermal noise of the test mass suspension) will play a role towards the low-frequency end of the detection band. As expected, the latter noise sources will be more prominent in third-generation GW detectors (Hild et al 2011;Punturo & Luck 2011;Huttner et al 2017), particularly due to the fact that the main aim of these detectors is to probe the low-frequency band; as low as a few Hz (Hild et al 2010). This low-frequency range is one of the main driving forces of third-generation GW detectors, since it encapsulates some rich information on the cosmological evolution of the Universe (see for instance, Punturo et al 2010a;Sathyaprakash et al 2010Sathyaprakash et al , 2012Srivastava et al 2019;Bachega et al 2020;Chen et al 2020;Maggiore et al 2020;Sharma & Harms 2020;Yang et al 2019bYang et al , 2020aZhang et al 2020, and references therein).…”

Cosmology with the Einstein Telescope: No Slip Gravity Model and Redshift Specifications

“…The achieved sensitivity by the first generation of interferometric detectors (LIGO [46], Virgo [47], GEO 600 [48] and TAMA [49]) was mainly limited by shot noise, mirror thermal noise and seismic noise, while for the second generation GW detectors, such as Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) [50], Advanced Virgo (AdV) [51], KAGRA [52,53], and LIGO-India [54] additional fundamental noise sources will play a role towards the low-frequency end of the detection band. As expected, the latter noise sources will be more prominent in third generation GW detectors [55][56][57], particularly due to the fact that the main aim of these detectors is to probe the low-frequency band; as low as a few Hz [58]. This low-frequency range is one of the main driving forces of third generation GW detectors, since it encapsulates some rich information on the cosmological evolution of the Universe (see, for instance, [28,30,31,34,37,43,44,[59][60][61][62], and references therein).…”

Localization of binary neutron star mergers with second and third generation gravitational-wave detectors

“…The Einstein Telescope is a proposed next-generation European gravitational wave observatory [62][63][64] with sensitivity an order of magnitude higher than advanced LIGO and extending down to 1 Hz. It intends to achieve this improvement through a combination of longer arms and improved technologies.…”

“…Additionally, entirely new detectors have been proposed. The Einstein Telescope is a next-generation European gravitational wave observatory [62][63][64], and Cosmic Explorer [65] is a proposed US-based future detector, both of which improve on the advanced detector sensitivity by a factor of 10 or more. As well as revealing new sources of gravitational waves, these detectors will allow us to observe BBH mergers throughout most of the history of the Universe [66] and BNS to cosmological distances [67][68][69][70].…”