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.
Carl Blair gave a talk about Gingin 80m prototype highlight and plan with future TAMA collaboration at the TAMA300 Strategy meeting in NAOJ.
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 Millar is visiting NAOJ for a two-week project for measuring birefringence of sapphire mirrors. He is an student at University of Western Australia.
Dr. Carl Blair, an LIGO commissioning expert and an ASPIRE coordinator at UWA, is visiting KAGRA for 3 weeks. KAGRA is under his control!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.