Einstein Telescope R&D

The ET-R&D project is aimed at essential R&D tasks in preparation for a technical design of the Einstein Telescope, a 3rd generation, underground gravitational wave detector. While the basic design mostly relies on techniques well developed and tested for the advanced detectors, several aspects still require R&D with long lead times. We propose to target the most important of these topics in this ET-R&D project via 5 working groups (WGs).
WG1 will explore how well astrophysical source models and GR itself can be tested with ET, and how much information on the dynamics of the universe can be extracted from the data. WG2 will collect long term seismic data for various candidate sites and develop methods for measuring the seismic motion which directly couples to the test mass motion, with the goal of developing subtraction techniques. WG3 will investigate properties of cryogenic optics essential for lowering detector thermal noise and providing good low frequency performance. The control of various interferometer degrees of freedom and noise correlations in the data of the three different ET detectors will be studied in WG4. WG5 will focus on overall project management.

This is an R&D project that will create novel search algorithms and theoretical models for astronomical systems. The outcome of this research will have impact both within the ET project but also within the wider astronomy and cosmology communities.