Deeksha and Michael visited KAGRA

Deeksha Beniwal, just graduated from University of Adelaide, and Michael Millar visited the KAGRA site. They said it was the first time visiting gravitational wave detectors. Sakamoto-san helped to dive in the heavy snow and Haoyu gave the tour. 

Michael is working on birefringence in NAOJ


Michael Millar is visiting NAOJ for a two-week project for measuring birefringence of sapphire mirrors. He is an undergraduate student at University of Western Australia and will start his master in this year.

Joint ASPIRE workshop on kHz GW

We will co-host a meeting “From Quarks to Neutron Stars: Insights from kHz gravitational waves” held at UT Hongo campus in April 23-24. Our OzGrav colleagues Paul Lasky and Lilli Sun will give invited talks.
https://indico2.riken.jp/event/5141/
This event is co-hosted by 2 ASPIRE projects; one by Hatsuda-san’s mathematical quantum science initiative and the other by our quantum control technology for GW astronomy.

Kentaro is back at ANU

It is summer here in Australia! Weather is great in Canberra now. People start to come back to work after a long vacation.
Kentaro will be staying at ANU until Feb 10 and will come back again on Mar 4.

FWG Open Meeting at Sci Tokyo

KAGRA Future Working Group Open Meeting was held at Science Tokyo and ca 40 people joined in person. Lily Sun at ANU gave a remote talk about a dark matter detection.

Attending OzGrav Retreat

Ryo, Haoyu, and Kentaro attended the OzGrav Retreat held in Brisbane. It was quite different from a usual conference, with a lot of games and activities. It was more like a party but at the same time people can learn a lot about GW, dark matter, fast radio pulsars, etc.

Kentaro in Australia for 2 weeks

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.

Bigfoot members visited UWA

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.