Control room full of boxes

At Maastricht University's Faculty of Science and Engineering physicists are building a test stand that should answer the biggest technological questions surrounding the new megatelescope. A few hundred meters from the banks of the Meuse river, in the pitch-black building that used to house the editorial and printing offices of the daily newspaper De Limburger, the ETpathfinder (in full: Einstein Telescope pathfinder) is now being built, a miniature version of the Einstein Telescope with 20-meter tunnels, where the real one will soon have 'arms' of 10 kilometers.

This set-up is too small to measure gravity waves,' says physicist Stefan Hild, project leader of ETpathfinder, looking down on the first contours of the future mini-detector from a glass-filled room in the brand-new faculty - until about five years ago, Maastricht University was not involved in research in fundamental physics. 'This will be the only place in the world where you can test all the necessary technology, vacuum tubes, lasers, mirrors, and so on, together,' he says. 'In that respect, it doesn't matter to us if the Einstein Telescope is around the corner, or still in Italy. We will even do research for the Americans, who are working on their own successor to Ligo.'

Read more (in the Volkskrant, in Dutch)