New leadership team to guide the Einstein Telescope Collaboration

Change at a defining moment for gravitational-wave science

To the point

• Leadership change: The international Einstein Telescope (ET) Collaboration announces a change in its scientific leadership, as a new spokesperson team takes office on 23 March 2026. Michele Maggiore and Angélique Lartaux will serve jointly as spokesperson and deputy spokesperson.
• Scientific foundations: The new leadership team succeeds Michele Punturo and Harald Lück, who have laid the foundations for Europe’s next-generation gravitational-wave observatory.
• Towards realization: The transition comes at a pivotal stage. Together, the new team will guide the collaboration through its next phase at a time when key decisions on the realization of the Einstein Telescope are approaching.

Harald Lück, outgoing deputy spokesperson and lead scientist at the Leibniz University Hannover and at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI) in Hannover, Germany, says: “I feel privileged to have contributed to building the foundations of the Einstein Telescope together with this remarkable community – from the earliest ideas to the vibrant and strong international collaboration we see today. As the project now enters a decisive and exciting new phase, I am confident that the new team will lead it successfully all the way to realisation.”

The role of the AEI in the Einstein Telescope project

The Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI) with locations in Potsdam and Hannover, has long been a leading institution in gravitational-wave research and is a co-initiator of the Einstein Telescope. Researchers at the institute hold leading positions within the project and the Einstein Telescope Scientific Collaboration.

Main Einstein Telescope research areas at the institute in Potsdam:

• Theoretical modeling of gravitational-wave sources using analytical and numerical techniques, both for black holes and neutron stars.
• Sophisticated and efficient methods for data analysis to infer the properties of the population of binary systems, the unknown internal structure of neutron stars, and the nature of gravity.
• Investigations of events where signals in the electromagnetic spectrum are expected in addition to gravitational-wave observations (multi-messenger astronomy).

Main Einstein Telescope research areas at the institute in Hannover:

• The development and testing of a laser source for the ETpathfinder in Maastricht and for the Einstein Telescope, the generation of squeezed light and its use, and the active suppression of seismic effects on ET's mirror suspensions.
• The 10 meter interferometer prototype in Hannover is a test bed for new technologies to be used in future interferometric gravitational-wave detectors.
• The “Glass Technologies for the Einstein Telescope” (GT4ET) project with the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering has developed miniaturized optomechanics for ET between 2022 and 2025.

The Einstein Telescope

The Einstein Telescope is a proposed third-generation gravitational-wave observatory that will significantly surpass the sensitivity of current detectors. By measuring tiny distortions in space-time caused by cosmic events, it will open a new era of precision gravitational-wave astronomy and deepen our understanding of fundamental physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Europe’s next-generation observatory for gravitational-wave detection, brings together more than 2,000 scientists from over 90 research units in more than 30 countries and represents an estimated €2 billion investment.