News & Events

The Einstein Telescope Euroregion Site and Technology project aims to pave the way for the construction of the largest interferometric gravitational wave observatory to be built on Earth. The approval of 15 million euros of funding, provided by the EU, the Walloon Region, the Flemish Region, the Dutch Ministry of Economy, North Rhine-Westphalia, the Province of Flemish Brabant, the Province of Limburg, will kickstart two sub-projects. The first one consists of an in depth study of the subsoil (down to 300m) on site. The second sub-project invovles de construction of a suspended cryogenic mirror, a feat never achieved before, which aims to validate the new technology required to increase the sensitivity of the Einstein Telescope to gravitational waves

The Einstein Telescope is an advanced gravitational-wave observatory, currently in the planning stage. The border region between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany is being considered as a possible location. This is because of its tranquillity, stable ground and strong ecosystem of scientific institutions and high-tech companies

ERC Research Project Silent

ERC Consolidator project SILENT, of which ULB is a co-beneficiary, intends to develop a new platform designed to better isolate gravitational wave detectors.

‘The environment is controlled by an optical seismometer, a liquid inclinometer and a gravimeter: the platform will be the most stable ever built on Earth, and the detector will be virtually floating in its space’, explains Christophe Collette, researcher at BEAMS (École polytechnique de Bruxelles) and associate professor at Liège University. 

Control and Mechatronics at the European Synchrotron Radiation

With the launch of the EBS (Extremely Brilliant Source project), many users will see data-acquisition times drop from milliseconds down to microseconds, and lower. That poses an issue for control systems, which will need to be more responsive in order to keep up, while maintaining synchronisation with the EBS storage ring.

It isn’t purely about timing, however. As more and more experimenters look towards the nanoscale, and want to perform their experiments more efficiently, control systems also need to become both more precise and more automated. This is where mechatronics can help. The ESRF already has plenty of expertise here, for example with the almost fully automated MASSIF beamlines at ID30, which can be set up to evaluate and probe macromolecular crystals without human intervention. For the EBS, a mechatronics task force has been created to work between groups within the ESRF’s Instrumentation Services and Development Division, and to provide a platform to share expertise in modelling, mechanics, electronics and software. A mechatronics laboratory is also forthcoming.

Various areas will see the benefits. Currently in development, a new double-crystal monochromator – the optical component that filters bundles of X-rays down to a single wavelength – will incorporate mechatronic concepts to improve precision. Similarly, the Nanopositioning and Active Stabilization Stage, or NASS, project – part of a collaboration with engineering physicist Christophe Collette at the University of Brussels in Belgium and colleagues – is working on a prototype for a new generation of highly integrated end-stations.

Read full article on pages 16-17 of the June 2018 edition of the ESRF News Journal.

Concrete state monitoring through embedded sensors

During the public works being carried out in Brussel’s Rogier tunnel, Arnaud Deraemaeker together with Cédric Dumoulin are working together with the platform Bruxelles Mobilité to put in place a sensor network which will allow remote monitoring of the state of the concrete in the tunnel ceiling

ICCMA Best Presentation: Jennifer Watchi

At the ICCMA Conference held in Delft during the first week of November, PML’s Jennifer Watchi was awarded the best presentation certificate for her exposition on “Study of MIMO Control Laws for Seismic Isolation of Flexible Payload”.

Our researchers Binlei Ding and Guoying Zhao carrying out tests with the 1 degree of freedom experiment currently set up in our laser room. Here at PML we are working on the development of a new active isolation system which fulfills the high performance criteria in the low frequency domain (from 10 mHz to 10 Hz). To reach the requirements, a high-resolution optical inertial sensor is currently under development. It combines good mechanical properties of a STS-1V seismometer with a low-noise interferometric readout.

Read the full article on the talk by Christophe Collette at the APPEC Technology Forum.