VIRGO

Virgo is the interferometer for gravitational waves located at Cascina, near Pisa in Italy, set up by the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and the Centre Nationalde la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Other partners in the collaborationare the Nikhef (Netherlands), the POLGRAW, Polish Academy of Science (Poland) and Wigner Institute (Hungary). The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) is responsible for operating the Virgo gravitationalwave detector. Virgo is a scientific collaboration involving some 500 physicists, engineers and technicians from 30 European laboratories.

The Virgo detector is a Michelson interferometer with two perpendicular arms, each 3 km long, inside which two laser beams travel.

More information on the Virgo project here.