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The Indian Roadmap for Gravitational-Wave Astronomy

IndIGO - ACIGA meeting on LIGO-Australia

Feb 8 - 10, 2011, New Delhi, India

The IndIGO consortium has been involved in a variety of initiatives to seed, nurture and develop gravitational-wave experiments in India and facilitate comprehensive participation in the exciting frontier international gravitational wave astronomy efforts, as envisaged in the DST proposal under which it was prepared. Most importantly the project has brought together several institutions like TIFR, IUCAA, RRCAT, CMI, IISER (Thiruvanthpuram), IISER (Kolkata) and Delhi University, under different ministries, under one umbrella of the IndIGO consortium, for advancing gravitational wave research in India. TIFR has funded an advanced prototype interferometer detector to develop experimental expertise. At this juncture, the efforts have matured and crystallized and to move ahead the IndIGO consortium needs to make a funding proposal to major Indian government agencies to participate in the construction and operation of a large scale international detector.

An exciting and opportune possibility has presented itself as the collaboration with the US-Australian initiative called LIGO-Australia. To discuss the challenges, implications and spin-offs of this exciting opportunity for Indian Science, the IndIGO Consortium has organised a meeting of the Indo-Australian collaboration and scientists from American LIGO during Feb 8 -10 in Delhi under the aegis of the AISTRF project DST/INT/AUS/P-26/2009 "Establishing Indo-Australian collaboration in Gravitational Wave Astronomy". This meeting in Delhi is a crucial step to bring together the major Australian, American and Indian collaborators to discuss the possibilities and plan for the logistics of the Indian participation in LIGO-Australia in the coming year and leading on towards building significant Indian presence in GW Astronomy over the next decade.

The session on the 8th February to be held in the India International Centre will be inaugurated by Prof. M.G.K. Menon and involve presentations by the Acting Director of LIGO-Australia, Stan Whitcomb; Chair of ACIGA, Jesper Munch; AIGRC Director, David Blair; IndIGO Council representatives C.S. Unnikrishnan, Sanjeev Dhurandhar and Tarun Souradeep and other important scientists involved in LIGO. This will be followed by meetings of the international representatives, heads of Government Departments, Directors of major Scientific Institutions and IndIGO Council members. The sessions on the next two days 9th and 10th February at Jamia Milia Islamia University co-hosted by Centre for Theoretical Physics would be devoted to more specific discussions on the technical and scientific aspects of the endeavour.


Contact Information:

Bala Iyer, Chair, IndIGO Consortium Council.
Tel. +91 (0)80 2361002 E-mail: bri (At) rri.res.in

Local Organiser: Prof. Sanjay Jhinghan +91 (0) 99104 77107

Participation by invitation only