The INFN Fellowship Programme 2011/2012 offers twenty positions for non Italian citizens for research activity in experimental physics. Fellowships are intended for young PhD holders who are under 35 years of age by December 15, 2011. Each fellowship, initially, is granted for one year and then, may be extended for a second year. The annual gross salary is EURO 28,000.

India looks increasingly likely to be the site of a new gravitational wave detector... Nature News Blog

A golden opportunity has possibly come knocking at the doors of the steadily growing Indian gravitational wave (GW) research community with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) at Caltech, U.S.A., recently identifying India as a potential site for locating its third interferometer... The Hindu

The IndIGO consortium has been accepted as a member research group of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). LSC is an international collaboration of scientists working on gravitational-wave-observation program, and is responsible for analyzing the data collected by the LIGO observatories in the USA and the GEO 600 observatory in Germany.

The Indian Initiative in Gravitational-Wave Observations (IndIGO) has been accepted as the newest member of the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC). This marks an important recognition to the consortium by the international gravitational-wave (GW) community. GWIC was formed in 1997 to facilitate international collaboration and cooperation in the construction, operation and use of the major GW detection facilities worldwide. GWIC is affiliated with the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation.

The IndIGO consortium is organizing a mock gravitational-wave (GW) data challenge for students. Simulated data of a future GW observatory called "Indigo" will be provided containing simulated GW signals from inspiralling binary black holes. Participants will be asked to detect these signals using the detection algorithms that they have developed, and to report the recovered parameters of the black-hole binaries.

The Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF) has funded an Indo-US Center for gravitational-wave physics and astronomy. The center will facilitate collaboration between Indian and US scientists working in the emerging field of gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy, with an eye to consolidating the Indo-US collaboration in GW-theory and data analysis, and extending it for setting up large-scale experimental facilities, and building related technological expertise in India.

A new paper appeared in the Physical Review Letters presents an important improvement in the analytical modeling of the gravitational waves (GWs) from black-hole mergers.

Coalescing black-hole binaries are among the most promising sources of GWs for interferometric detectors like LIGO. GW signals will be buried in the detector noise, and to find them GW astronomers cross correlate the data against theoretical predictions. The most sophisticated current theoretical models combine perturbative calculations of the slow inspiral of a binary with large-scale supercomputer simulations of the merger.

Until now those models dealt only with black holes that do not spin. But it is likely that many black holes in the universe are highly spinning. Adding spin to GW models is challenging, because the spinning-binary parameter space is large and poorly understood, and could require thousands of expensive simulations to model.

The authors simplify the problem by considering only configurations with fixed (non-precessing) spins, making the problem tractable with ~40 simulations. They find that in some cases the new model will allow observations out to up to five times the volume of the universe accessible with past models. Remarkably, there is also evidence that a large fraction of all (generic) spinning binaries could be detected with this model.

The lead author of this paper is a member of the IndIGO consortium.

1 - 23 December, 2011
IUCAA, Pune and Holiday Inn, Goa.

The International Centre for Theoretical Sciences is organizing a comprehensive programme covering frontline areas of research in Gravitation and Cosmology. The programme consists of a school on Cosmology and Gravity Waves (to be held in Pune), an International Conference on Gravitation and Cosmology (to be held in Goa) and a workshop on Gravitational-Wave Astronomy (in Pune).