Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer

TL;DR

The paper reviews the development and scientific goals of the Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer, advanced gravitational wave detectors that will significantly improve sensitivity and frequency range, enabling new astrophysical discoveries.

Contribution

It provides an overview of the current status and expected scientific impact of next-generation GW detectors, highlighting their enhanced capabilities and potential for groundbreaking observations.

Findings

Up to 8 times more sensitive than current detectors

Extended frequency coverage below 10 Hz

Enhanced multimessenger observation potential

Abstract

The goal of this talk is to give an overview of the current status of the development of the Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer ground based gravitational wave (GW) detectors and of their foreseen scientific goals. These detectors will be up to a factor 8 more sensitive across the band covered by current detectors, namely LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA, and will extend the accessible frequency band towards the low frequency regime, i.e., below 10 Hz. These improvements will not only enhance the number and quality of GW observations, but will also enable researchers to have access to sources and physical processes which are out of reach for current detectors and explore the possibility of detecting previously unknown GW sources. The improvement in sensitivity in the low frequency regime will also increase the observation time of compact binary coalescence events, strengthening the collaboration with electromagnetic observatories for multimessenger observations of binary neutron star events. In fact, current detectors proved that joint observations of GW events with electromagnetic observatories are not only possible, but they can also give us unprecedented insights on the underlying physics of astrophysical processes.