Advanced Virgo scientists are preparing for the upcoming third LIGO–Virgo scientific Observation Run (O3).

Advanced Virgo and Advanced LIGO have scheduled engineering runs to prepare for O3. The four-day engineering run, ER13, was completed on the 18th of December, 2018; more details are available here. In particular, ER13 allowed for an end-to-end test of the procedure for releasing Open Public Alerts.

. These alerts will notify the physics and astronomy community whenever a potential gravitational-wave transient event is observed. As these alerts need to be circulated within a short time frame, a rapid response team is charged with guaranteeing their quality.

A second engineering run, ER14, is scheduled for March 2019. ER14 will last approximately four weeks and will be followed by the third LIGO-Virgo scientific Observation Run (O3). An updated timeline can be found here.

Advanced Virgo has to improve further in terms of sensitivity and stability of operation in order to meet O3 requirements. One of the ER14 milestones will be the enhancement of Advanced Virgo sensitivity through the use of squeezed-light. More details about Advanced Virgo upgrades are listed here.

Image: The image shows a detail of the optics used to inject the squeezed-light into Advanced Virgo.