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.
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 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.
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.
James Gardner, a PhD student at ANU who is currently doing research at Caltech with Yanbei Chen, is visiting us from July 3 through July 12. He gave a presentation at Tokyo Tech and U Tokyo on his work to detect stochastic GW with a single detector, and also had discussions on intracavity schemes.
Several researchers from Japan visited UWA and ANU after GWADW2024. They enjoyed BBQ and experiments!