The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) is a French-Italian consortium founded by INFN and CNRS to foster European collaboration in gravitational wave research. EGO is located in Cascina, near Pisa, Italy and hosts the Virgo gravitational wave detector.
The Virgo project involves the collaboration of about 20 laboratories with more than 250 scientists, engineers and technicians from France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary and Spain.The vacuum system of Virgo consists of two 3 km long straight tubes, 1.2 m in diameter, and 10 vertical cylinders, called ‘towers’ (2 m in diameter and up to 11 m high) containing optical elements suspended to anti-seismic attenuators.
Vacuum is needed to isolate the sensitive parts of the experiment from several disturbances directly affecting the performance of Virgo; the system has been designed and tested to reach a base pressure of 10-9 mbar after bake-out.
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