2023 OzGrav Winter School

DATE: 19-21 July 2023

LOCATION

University of Western Australia
The OzGrav Early Career Researcher (ECR) Winter School will be held on the 19-21 of July in Perth. The Winter School is open to OzGrav students and postdocs, and is an opportunity to learn about the instrumentation and astrophysics of gravitational wave science. You will also have the chance to network and get to know your fellow OzGrav students and postdocs!

TRAVEL SUPPORT

Accommodation, main meals, and a social activity will be organised and paid for by the Centre. The Centre will also contribute some funding towards travel, which should be booked by the attendee’s home institution and then invoiced to Swinburne.

REGISTRATION HAS CLOSED

CONTACTS

If you have any questions, please contact the organisers Damon Beveridge (damon.beveridge@research.uwa.edu.au) and Ruby Chan (ruby.chan@uwa.edu.au)

ACCOMODATION

Accommodation has been booked for everyone that has requested at the Ibis Perth hotel (334 Murray St, Perth WA 6000). Accommodation details have been emailed to attendees individually. Please email Damon Beveridge (damon.beveridge@research.uwa.edu.au) or Ruby Chan (ruby.chan@uwa.edu.au) for any questions you have about the bookings.

TRAVEL

Public transport:
Public transport is the recommended method for travelling between the city and the airport. The Perth Airport train line runs directly from all terminals into the city. Upon the train arriving in the city, it is a short ~8 minute walk to the hotel.
If arriving/departing at Terminals 3 and 4, there is short TransPerth bus (bus 292) that you will need to take to get to the Redcliffe Train Station which services the airport train line.
If arriving/departing at Terminals 1 and 2, there is a dedicated “Airport Central” train station across the road from the exit of the terminal.
There are additional bus routes that service the Airport and travel to the city if you would like to do that instead. These include bus routes 39, 935 and 940.
All buses and trains run on the Perth public transport system (TransPerth). For buses, you can purchase a ticket onboard with cash but no change will be given. The train stations have dedicated ticket machines where you can purchase a ticket for your journey. For the 292 bus that takes you to Redcliffe Station, it is recommended that you buy a 2 zone ticket on the bus, which you can then use as your ticket for the train ride into the city as well. A 2 zone ticket is the maximum price for TransPerth, which is listed as $5.10.

Taxi or ride share: Outside arrivals for each terminal there are separate dedicated taxi and rideshare pickup areas. For information on rideshare pickup locations, please refer to the following information on the Perth Airport website.
https://www.perthairport.com.au/to-and-from-the-airport/transport-options/rideshare

MEALS

All main meals will be provided for the duration of the workshop (Wednesday to Friday). For interstate attendees, you have access to the buffet breakfast at the hotel (breakfast won’t be provided for local attendees). Lunches (except Wednesday) are organised with a voucher system, where you can take the vouchers to any UWA Guild Cafe, or the Tavern, to redeem them. There is also one voucher per person per day set aside for a coffee/drink/snack at one of the cafes during one of the day’s breaks. Dinners are also provided, and information about them can be found in the program below. No alcoholic drinks will be provided.

The lunch on the Wednesday will be at the UWA Tavern, and a menu can be found here. Please look at the menu and list your order on this spreadsheet by Monday the 17th so that there are no delays on the day.

PROGRAM

Location:
The Winter School is being hosted on campus at The University of Western Australia. The morning session on Wednesday will be hosted in the Physics Building in room 2.17, and we will have signs up and people available for directions on the day. From the afternoon session on Wednesday to the end of the workshop, it will be hosted in the EZONE North building in room 1.11 (except for Friday morning which will be one room over in EZONE North room 1.10). An interactive campus map can be found here.

To get to campus each day, we recommend catching the Purple CAT Bus from the city. The bus stop in the city is a 5-6 minute walk from the hotel, directions can be found here. We recommend getting off the bus on Stirling Hwy and walking to the Physics building or EZONE North, directions here and here respectively (for both of these journeys, there is a tunnel under Stirling Hwy to cut the walk shorter, just walk east from the bus stop instead of west and there is a path through some trees)

The Purple CAT Bus can also be caught from campus to the same area in the city.

Wednesday 19 July 2023

  • 09:00 – 09:30 : Introduction, Welcomes from OzGrav Node Leader and Head of School (Physics)
  • 09:30 – 10:00 : Icebreakers
  • 10:00 – 10:30 : Morning Break
  • 10:30 – 12:00 : Rotating Tours of Einstein First and Instrumentation Labs
  • 12:00 – 13:00 : Lunch at UWA Tavern. Please fill in orders here by Monday the 17th.
  • 13:00 – 15:00 : COMPAS & Population Synthesis Workshop (Yuzhe Song, Swinburne)
  • 15:00 – 15:30 : Afternoon Break
  • 15:30 – 16:00 : Talk #1 (Angira Mahida, UWA)
  • 16:00 – 16:30 : Talk #2 (Liana Rauf, Queensland)
  • 16:30 – 17:00 : Talk #3 (David Coward, UWA)
  • 17:00 – 19:00 : Dinner at Varsity Nedlands
  • 20:00 : Social Activity – Kings Park Lightscape

Thursday 20 July 2023

  • 09:00 – 09:30 : Talk #4 (Alistair Mcleod, UWA)
  • 09:30 – 10:00 : Talk #5 (Ori Henderson-Sapir, Adelaide)
  • 10:00 – 10:30 : Talk #6 (Yuzhe Song, Swinburne)
  • 10:30 – 11:00 : Morning Break
  • 11:00 – 12:00 : Lecture on Compact Object Mergers in Dense Environments (Evgeni Grishin, Monash)
  • 12:00 – 13:00 : Lunch
  • 13:00 – 15:00 : Education and Public Outreach Workshop (Jackie Bondell)
  • 15:00 – 15:30 : Afternoon Break
  • 15:30 – 17:00 : GW Parameter Estimation with Machine Learning Workshop (Chayan Chatterjee, UWA)
  • 17:30 : Dinner at Steve’s Bar & Cafe. We have booked the cellar dining venue, and the set menu allows for choices from the following on the night.
    • Entree
      • Heirloom tomato, Stracciatella, basil, garlic crumb, vincotto (vegetarian)
      • Premium seared scallops, lemon, butter, citrus salad (gluten free)
      • Crumbed chicken katsu, steamed rice, tonkatsu sauce, kewpie mayo
    • Main
      • Grilled cauliflower steak, yellow curry, spicy peanut & roast pumpkin salad (vegetarian, vegan, gluten free)
      • Roasted market fish, stone fruit, soft herbs, goat’s fetta (gluten free)
      • Slow-roasted WA lamb rack, cooked medium, herbed potato cake, broccolini, jus (gluten free)
    • Dessert
      • Textures of chocolate: flourless almond cake, creme, brownie, snow, soil, salted caramel macadamias (vegetarian)
      • Baked custard, palm sugar caramel, blood orange, toasted coconut, lemon balm (vegetarian, gluten free)

Friday 21 July 2023

TALKS

  • Talk #1: Searching for Gravitational Waves with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (Angira Mahida, UWA)
    Abstract: Domain walls are cosmological defects that occur in the early universe. These defects leave behind traces of their decay in the form of standard model particles and dark radiation, which can be observed in the form of gravitational waves. Pulsar timing arrays provide a means to detect these gravitational waves. Our study aims to investigate the presence and characteristics of the stochastic gravitational wave background originating from different scenarios of domain walls decay using Parks pulsar timing data.
  • Talk #2: Exploring BBH Mergers with Shark & COMPAS (Liana Rauf, Queensland)
    Abstract: With GW astronomy becoming a fast-growing field, we require tools/simulations to understand how they can help solve some of the biggest mysteries in the Universe. In this talk, I will discuss how I generate populations of stars using the population synthesis code COMPAS and evolve them in galaxies from a semi-analytic model called Shark, to determine the number of mergers occurring in each simulation time-step. This allows us to track the formation and evolution of these binary black holes, link their merger rates to host galaxy properties and forecast the number of GW events in future galaxy surveys. I will discuss the possible reasons for the discrepancies between our simulation and current observations, and solutions to resolve this. I will also discuss the merger rate completeness of SHARK as a function redshift, which is ideal for tracing host galaxies with high merger rates. The implications of this work can be utilised for constraining stellar evolution models and measuring cosmological parameters such as the Hubble constant.
  • Talk #3: Zadko Updates (David Coward, UWA)
  • Talk #4: Detecting Compact Binary Coalescence Gravitational Waves (Alistair Mcleod, UWA)
  • Talk #5: Mid-IR Fibre Lasers for LIGO Thermal Compensation System (Ori Henderson-Sapir, Adelaide)
    Abstract: In this talk I will give a brief overview of LIGO’s thermal compensation system (TCS) including ring heaters and CO2 lasers to mitigate thermal lensing effects. I will also mention the prospective FROSTY system which offers promising enhancements. I will then move to talk about exploring the potential of using 3.5-µm fibre laser systems for dynamic thermal actuation. I will discuss the development and current state of these fibre lasers at the University of Adelaide and in general and how their advancement can potentially redefine the TCS in LIGO.
  • Talk #6: Invisible Gamma-Ray Pulsars & Where to Find Them (Yuzhe Song, Swinburne)
    Abstract: The continuing survey of the gamma-ray sky with the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered over 300 gamma-ray pulsars in the last 14 years. However, they only account for 10% of the known pulsars to date. The remaining 90% could simply be below the detection limit of Fermi-LAT. To verify this, I developed novel stacking techniques to analyse Fermi-LAT data beyond the limit of point source sensitivity. A significant detection of a stacked signal over the background was made, and a characterisation of a pulsar-like spectral index and a characteristic flux well below the Fermi-LAT point source sensitivity. A follow up analysis on these pulsar populations using COMPAS, a rapid binary population synthesis code, is being conducted. Combining existing models of pulsar gamma-ray emission mechanisms and current prescriptions of canonical and binary neutron star evolution in COMPAS, we will be able to provide a best fit model that can describe all the catalogued pulsars observed individually in radio and gamma-ray surveys, as well as the stacking analysis.