We have four visitors from UWA working on data analysis. They visited different places; University of Tokyo, Science Tokyo, and KAGRA. This week, all of them came to ST. We had a farewell party of Alistair on Tuesday and a BBQ on Friday. The weather was pretty good, right after the ending of rainy season. All the lab members joined and there were twenty people including a couple of former students.
Alistair who visited us at Science Tokyo for 2 months is leaving on Jul 3, so we had a farewell party at Yoro-no-Taki in Oh-okayama. The other picture is the one at Hama-sushi the other day.
A couple of my students and I attended the annual ASPIRE meeting of the Quantum Division at the JST HQ in Tokyo. I missed it last year for a conference, so it was my first time to see other ASPIRE PIs. It was interesting that I found a number of names of my former colleagues in their presentations. What a small world!
A year ago, we had GW Advanced Detector Workshop (GWADW) in Hamilton Island. This year the workshop was held in Florida, at Cocoa Beach. It was quite far from Japan, even further from Canberra, but it was worth the 24-hour flight. About 100 people attended and discussed various GW techniques including Optics, Quantum, Suspensions, etc. A new session about Lunar detectors (GW detection on the Moon) was interesting. We can propose some ASPIRE related technology.
On the second day of the workshop, there was a launch of SpaceX Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Workshop attendants went to the private beach of Hilton, the workshop venue, at 11pm and enjoyed the magnificent event. Some of us went to a nearby spot but it was still 25km away and the blast sound reached us 1 min later.
On the third day, we went to an excursion to KSC. We saw Saturn 5 and Space Shuttle Atlantis. I learned afterwards that the Saturn 5 is not a replica but a real composite. In 2009 we had GWADW in Florida, at Fort Lauderdale, and I happened to see a Space Shuttle launch. All the Shuttle records were displayed at KSC and I learned it was Atlantis. It is amazing that I met her again after 16 years.
The kHz GW workshop was held at Hongo this week and two researchers from Australia, Lilli Sun (ANU) and Paul Lasky (Monash) gave talks on the on-going gravitational-wave observation and the kHz detector discussions.
The workshop was co-hosted by another ASPIRE program by Prof Hatsuda (RIKEN). The Program Officer of ASPIRE’s Quantum division also attended the first joint ASPIRE event with a few managers from JST.
Shalika visited UWA for two weeks after the LVK meeting. She worked with Alex on birefringence measurements of sapphire at 2 um wavelength. She also learnt how to use and align a CO2 laser with Koh at Gingin facility.
A number of people leave ANU at the same time this year. Jonas already left, taking a postdoc position at Denmark, Dan finished his PhD and is leaving ANU in the end April. James is about to finish his PhD and is going to Chicago. But Today, we are all here at ANU, and here is the group photo of the team quantum (we do miss Kar Meng, Ryo, etc. though).
Haoyu and Kenji (Nagoya University) visited University of Adelaide after the LVK meeting. They worked on KAGRA Finesse simulations with Dr. Daniel Brown.
Takano-kun and Diego, with some other students in U Tokyo visited ANU after the LVK meeting. Takano-kun and his colleagues had discussions and lab tours mainly with the TORPEDO team lead by Prof. Slagmolen. Diego discussed his work on Continuous Wave analysis with Dr. Sun.
A biannual meeting for the LVK collaboration was held at Melbourne and many of our ASPIRE colleagues attended. After the conference dinner, the venue transformed into a karaoke party, and Japanese colleagues performed YOASOBI.