ADVANCED VIRGO INTERFEROMETER: A SECOND GENERATION DETECTOR FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES OBSERVATION

In the last ten years great improvements have been done in the development and operation of ground based detectors for Gravitational Waves direct observation and study. The second generation detectors are presently under construction in Italy, United States and Japan with a common intent to create a worldwide network of instruments able to start a new era in astronomy and astrophysics, a century after the development of the General Relativity theory predicting the existence of Gravitational Waves. The design sensitivity of the advanced detectors will be approximately ten times better with respect to the previous generation corresponding to an increment of a factor one thousand in the observational volume of the Universe where black holes, neutron stars and other enigmatic sources of these weak signals are spread around. In this paper we present a general overview of the advanced detectors with particular emphasis on Advanced VIRGO, the largest European interferometer located at the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) site in the Pisa countryside (Italy).