Two regions that are officially competing for the same project now want to pull in the same direction: on 17 July, the Free State of Saxony and the Italian region of Sardinia will seal their joint bid for the Einstein Telescope at the Ethnographic Museum in Nuoro. The President of the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, Alessandra Todde, and Saxony's Science Minister, Sebastian Gemkow, had already signed an initial declaration of intent in Rome in January, according to the Technical University of Dresden.
The Einstein Telescope (ET) is designed as a third-generation detector to pick up gravitational waves with unprecedented precision — at least ten times more sensitive than today's facilities, according to Physics World, and able to gather in a single day as many signals as LIGO and Virgo collected in a decade. Researchers hope it will give them a sharper view of merging black holes and of the earliest moments of the universe. Costing around two billion euros, the project is regarded as the largest astrophysics research infrastructure planned in Europe in decades.
Competition turns into cooperation
Rather than crowding each other out, Saxony and Sardinia are betting on the so-called double-L configuration. Under it, the ET would not be built at a single place but from two complementary L-shaped interferometers with arms about 15 kilometres long — one in Lusatia, one near Nuoro. The alternative would be a single triangular observatory with sides of roughly ten kilometres. The double-L option is also backed by Nobel physics laureate Giorgio Parisi, who chairs a scientific advisory body for the Italian bid; supporters see advantages in cost, risk and the precise localisation of cosmic signals.
Both sites bring favourable geological conditions. Lusatia is among the seismologically quietest regions in Europe; its dry granite was already mapped in detail thanks to former mining. On the German side, TU Dresden and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology carry the cooperation; TUD also leads a feasibility study of the Lusatian rock, funded under the federal STARK programme. Sardinia, in turn, relies on the seismically stable, sparsely populated area around the former Sos Enattos mine.
The agreement provides for joint research projects, the sharing of geophysical and seismic data, and joint training programmes. The choice of site — alongside Lusatia and Sardinia, the Meuse-Rhine Euregio in the tri-border area of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands is also bidding — is to be decided at European level in the second half of 2027.