Kentaro visited UWA and ANU in December. At UWA, David Blair showed me an exciting collection of educational devices designed to teach kids the fun of physics! At ANU, Kentaro met his student Ryo Iden for the first time since the ASPIRE workshop (see the photo). Kentaro will attend the OzGrav Retreat from Dec 11 as an Associate Investigator.
After Adelaide, the Bigfoot members, without Iden-kun who flew back to Canberra, visited University of Western Australia (UWA) in Perth.
On Wednesday, people visited the Gingin observatory and enjoyed Australian BBQ. In the weekend, people went to the Cottesloe Beach to play beach volleyball.
Marc, Haoyu, Haba-kun, Iden-kun, Takeshita-kun, and Shlika, or so-called Bigfoot members who work on birefringence problem of GW optics, visited the University of Adelaide to discuss thermal compensation and birefringence of GW telescope test masses.
In the picture, you can find Dan and Mitchell, our colleagues who visited Japan last August.
Felix Wojcik at University of Western Australia visited the KAGRA site. Haoyu gave a tour with Sakamoto-san at ICRR. Felix said he spent good time!
Somiya visited OIST to see Prof Jason Twamley, a former professor at Macquarie University in Australia. We discussed Jason’s recent publication about his experiment of diamagnetic levitation and many more quantum information related topics. The weather was so good in Okinawa!
Some of the ASPIRE folks gathered at U Hiroshima to update the KAGRA+ white paper. We kept writing and discussing the contents late into the night, over dinner and even after dinner.
A new ASPIRE Research Assistant Professor Haoyu Wang joined the team from Oct 1. Haoyu is an expert of the modal model simulation. His recent study is the analysis of influence of non-uniform birefringence in KAGRA’s sapphire mirrors.
Our OzGrav colleagues, Ju Li, Chiara, Mitchell, Alex, Koh, and Avanish, visited the KAGRA site with Dr. Takano and Prof. Somiya. We took a local train on a country road from Toyama to Kamioka, which is an experience like no other.
Dr. Daniel Brown (Univ of Adelaide) gave a special seminar about the LIGO commissioning and the latest modal model simulation development at the KAGRA face-to-face meeting at Tokyo City University.
Over 40 people including 9 researchers from Australia enjoyed the workshop at the Australian Embassy in Tokyo. Ms. Pitt and Ms. Tsukamoto, the counselor and the senior manager in the education and research division of the Embassy, also attended the event. See here for more detail.