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.
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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.
Bigfoot members visited Adelaide
Marc, Haoyu, Haba-kun, Iden-kun, Takeshita-kun, and Shalika, 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 visited us at KAGRA
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!
Visiting OIST
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!
White Paper Writing Workshop at Hiroshima
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.
Prof Haoyu Wang joined the team
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.