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arXiv · 2610.17446

Einstein Telescope: the triangle in a network and the impact of the relative orientation of detectors

Giacomo Bruno·Antonin Oswald·Federico De Lillo
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Abstract

The geometrical configuration of the Einstein Telescope (ET) gravitational-wave observatory is one the most important design choices to be made for this future scientific facility. Two baseline configurations are currently being considered, a single triangle or 2 distant L-shaped detectors tilted by about $45^{\circ}$. In this document we present a study of the scientific performance of the ET baseline configurations in both stand-alone mode and in the presence of either an L-shaped Cosmic Explorer detector with 40-km long arms located in the United States or the existing LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network. We also include in the study an alternative ET configuration, which is currently not being considered and consists of a triangle plus a distant L-shaped detector. We find that in stand-alone mode this alternative configuration performs significantly better than the other two in both the compact binary coalescence and stochastic gravitational wave background scientific cases. The differences in performance between the ET configurations are reduced in the presence of the considered, additional non-ET detectors. We also show that the impact of possible correlated noise in co-located detectors on the stochastic gravitational-wave background performance can be addressed with the addition of extra detectors. Finally, we study the impact on the ET scientific performance of the relative orientation of the future detectors in the network. We find that, while the configurations that include a triangular ET detector are basically insensitive to this orientation, a balanced compromise for the ET configuration consisting of two L-shaped detectors could be represented by a tilt angle between the two detectors of about $30^{\circ}$.

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Giacomo Bruno, Antonin Oswald, Federico De Lillo. 2026-10-12. Einstein Telescope: the triangle in a network and the impact of the relative orientation of detectors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17446

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