It's been a year since the last newsletter and many things happened, but the most exciting were the last ones. During all this time, many of us have been working close to Virgo and we were looking forward to see the day it would start taking data together with our LIGO colleagues. So this happened the 1st of August when Virgo started its science. But arriving to that point had not all been plain sailing. During commissioning many challenges were faced and happily it was possible to increment the range for BNS from less than 10Mpc to 25Mpc in less than 2 months.
In parallel to the commissioning during the first week of July I had the opportunity to go to the Amaldi conference. The conference was held in Pasadena, California and it was a meeting point for the gravitational wave community. Also it was a great working week because for first time I could give a talk and present a poster. That was a great experience.
But before this exciting period lots of things happened!
From the grawiton project, I attended to two (and a half) schools. The first one was held on Hanover during September 2016, this one was the 2nd Tech school on optics. Then it came the short school Data analysis and machine learning that was held at Virgo taking advantage to the fact that there was a visitor from the collaboration working with those techniques. The last grawiton school was devoted to project management of big scientific projects. The last grawiton school was special because it was the last time that all grawiton students could met together during our thesis, I hope we can meet all again soon!
On my outreach activities I collaborated with the organisation of the Internet Festival in Pisa explaining Virgo and gravitational waves to the general public. This was a beautiful experience because explaining what are gravitational waves to children not only is difficult, but it means that at least you understand them.
But the last year was not only spend doing activities outside my office. It's been hard, but finally I could develop a ray tracing software that can be used to find out the noise generated by mechanical elements moving at a certain frequency. I am sure that there are still bugs to be found, but I am quite sure that the method is working. And I hope that soon some results of the noise produced by an external detection bench will be seen soon.