—News and announcements—
- Problems during last VSC council. During EGO council was presented a document by former spokesperson and commissioning coordinator about what went wrong with Virgo during O4a. Many people did not agree, most of the discussion happened before the VSC council. As a result Frédérique Marion stepped down as deputy spokesperson
- Conflict with US policies, Virgo risks to not contribute enough on data and computing facilities. Risk for Virgo to lose LIGO data and authorship
- VECS post-doc co-chair candidate missing, deadline 16 February for nomination
- ET shortage of person-power for blue book activities: call for contributors
- ET pathfinder workshop: plans to complete the beam splitter tower by July. Project to study cryogenic shields to find best solution on which arm to equip first
- ET optics: discussions on priority of operations and tests. Concern about mirrors: no polishing companies so far wanted to do the substrate as the silicon will be very challenging
- Interesting paper about primordial black holes came out at the end of January (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.14431.pdf)
— Continuous waves updates —
Louvain
- Antoine Depasse: Investigation on errors in recovering parameters, no resolution in frequency. Hypothesis: effect of approximation in modulation of the signal. A check is in progress
— Stochastic GW background updates —
Antwerp
- Anirban Ain new member of Belgrav @Antwerp (welcome!)
- Max Lalleman: isotropic search, start to analyze the first 6 months of data
Brussels
- Alba Romero-Rodriguez: in isotropic group new time shifted analysis with the purpose of helping the Detchar group. Eventuality of data quality vetos of 80 seconds but adding them would not be beneficial for CBC search
Louvain
- Jishnu Suresh: waiting for isotropic group analysis. Analysis frame is ready to be shared (https://dcc.ligo.org/DocDB/0186/T2300083/007/O4-Analysis-Ready-Frames-v7.pdf)
— Instrumentation updates —
Antwerp
- Hans Van Haevermaet: preparing coils for first part of bench setup, probably ready in March. From march starting to build bench tower, put bench on lock system, put sensors, test bench tower.
- Anoop Koushik: presented few slides on work on BOSEM calibration and characterization. Study of linearity on displacement and ambience effects.
— Computing updates —
Louvain
- Andres Jorge Tanasijczuk: no major updates. End of February deliver computing requirements for ET
Brussels
- Alexander Sevrin: soon meeting to define a framework (ET?)
— Final announcements —
- New PhD joined belgrav: will contribute on GW waveforms
- Belgian dutch GW meeting hosted in Louvain/Leuven. Week before GW orchestra
- Alberto Mariotti contacted by Tjionne Li to start organizing GW seminars. Good to include people in Belgrav network. I start to talk with them, if everybody agrees we propose speakers. Seminars focused mainly on theory but likely to enlarge the field. Laura Bernard (?) next speaker
- 22 March 2024 Kip Thorne will be at Leuven university
- GW orchestra 16-20 September @LAPP. Jishnu Shuresh will share more information
