Ultra high vacuum beam pipe of the Einstein Telescope project: Challenges and perspectives

Abstract

The Einstein Telescope (ET) is a project aiming to realize a facility to host a gravitational wave (GW) detector of the third generation. The new instrument will change our vision of the Universe by observing millions of GW signals emitted during the coalescence of stellar and intermediate-mass black hole binary systems. It will permit to shed light on the first phase of the Universe formation and it will contribute to solving the dark matter enigma. The new GW detector is conceived as a series of six nested Michelson interferometers forming a triangle of 10 km side. The laser light biasing the interferometers must propagate in large ultra-high vacuum (UHV) tubes in order to reduce the noise induced by the residual gas pressure fluctuations, setting a requirement on the residual pressure in the 10−10 mbar range. The vacuum system will be made of a pipe with a 1 m diameter and an overall length of 120 km, making ET one of the largest UHV systems ever made. The giant UHV project asks for attentive optimization of material choice, manufacturing processes, post-processing treatments of the tubes, and pumping systems in order to find a cost-effective solution. In this article, we shortly review the vacuum solution adopted in the case of the second generation of GW detectors. After a general description of the main elements that constitute the ET vacuum system, the detailed design being the subject of the next 3 years of work, we will present a refined calculation of the noise due to residual-gas pressure fluctuations in the ET beam pipe.