Author: Marcus Mohring

This workshop aims to bring together leading researchers and industry professionals to address sustainability challenges and innovative solutions for this large underground infrastructure. Discussions will span the entire project lifecycle, from initial design to decommissioning, with a dedicated session fostering collaboration opportunities for industrial partners. 

Sustainability has become a top priority across industries, fueling global initiatives to conserve resources, reduce carbon emissions, and mitigate environmental impacts while promoting efficiency and collaboration throughout product life cycles. The development of large-scale underground infrastructures, such as the Einstein Telescope, requires an integrated and forward-thinking approach to ensure sustainability is embedded across every phase of its lifecycle.
This research-industry workshop seeks to bring together leading experts and industry actors to discuss sustainability challenges linked to large-scale underground scientific infrastructures. Using the Einstein Telescope project as a model case, the event will foster innovative discussions and collaborative solutions to address these critical issues.

The program will facilitate the examination and the discussion of sustainability approaches applicable throughout the complete project lifecycle:

• Design Phase: Integration of sustainability principles in initial conceptualization and planning
• Construction Phase: Implementing eco-friendly building techniques and material selection and reuse strategies.
• Operational Phase: Minimizing resource consumption and environmental impact
• Decommissioning Phase: Evaluation of responsible site restoration approaches.

The workshop will include a dedicated session, for potential industrial collaborators, to explore partnership opportunities in this cutting-edge scientific endeavor, to examine relevant aspects of a sustainable procurement strategy and to have the opportunities of scheduling 1:1 meetings with project experts in “Affreschi” Room adjacent to the main workshop room.

This Workshop is organized in the context of the activities carried out by Workpackages 7 and 9, of the Einstein Telescope Preparatory Phase (ET_PP) EU funded program.

Overview of the Workshop Sessions

MONDAY 16/02/26

• 8.00 – 9.00: Registration for the Workshop
• 9.00 – 11.00: Session I – Introduction
• 11.00 – 11.30: Coffee Break
• 11.30 – 13.00: Session II – Life cycle sustainability assessment
• 13.00 – 14.00: Lunch break
• 14.00 – 15.45: Session III – Sustainable transportation and smart energy
• 15.45 – 16.15: Coffee break
• 16.15 – 18.00: Session IV – Efficient operation
• 20.00 – 22.00: Social Dinner

TUESDAY 17/02/26

• 9.00 – 10.45: Session V – Solutions for underground construction
• 10.45 – 11.15: Coffee Break
• 11.15 – 13.00: Session VI – Societal Impact Strategy and Participatory Design
• 13.00 – 14.00: Lunch Break
• 14.00 – 15.45: Session VI – Industry engagement and sustainable procurement

The preliminary timetable can also be viewed on this page with more detailed information.

Workshop Website

General Relativity (GR) perfectly describes a variety of phenomena in gravity at energy scales much less than the Planck mass. However, this theory calls for an ultraviolet (UV) completion at higher energies. 

Various approaches have been developed in this direction in the past decades, including (but not limited to) string theory, which naturally contains the limit of GR. The low-energy effective field theory (EFT) of GR can also have a UV completion which is formulated as a field theory, perturbatively including higher curvature operators or non- perturbatively with an asymptotically safe fixed point. Formulation of new methods, especially working for gravity in the non-perturbative regime, requires more exchanges between the scientific communities that used to be separated. We believe that cross-team discussions will lead to significant progress in understanding the self-consistency and potential phenomenological implications of UV complete descriptions of gravity.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together the experts working on different UV complete approaches to quantum gravity, from string theory to various perturbative and non-perturbative approaches. Given the promising opportunity to probe quantum gravity effects in the very early Universe with future CMB and gravitational wave experiments, we expect the in-depth discussions on predictions and self-consistency of low- energy effective theories on top of cosmological backgrounds.

The meeting will be mainly focused on the following directions:

• Non-perturbative methods, in application to quantum gravity, such as string theory, amplitudes bootstrap, functional renormalisation group, loop quantum gravity, etc.
• Quantum gravity effects in the early Universe: inflation, cosmological correlators, non-gaussianities, gravitational waves.
• EFT of gravity in connection with cosmology and Black Holes.
• other related topics.

Workshop Website