During the first GraWIToN school, every day alarm waked me up at 7am. I realised that a new busy day has started.
There were so abundant coursesin the first GraWIToN school. In those 3 weeks, from theories to experiments, we went through the lectures of Optics, Simulation, High Power Lasers and Data Analysis etc, which almost covered all aspects of the current research fields of the Gravitational Waves detection. Professors and speakers came from different universities/institutes and in different fields gave us so many inspiring lectures. One of the most impressive things is that Numerical Relativity was taught in just 4 hours, which was commented by Dr. Shubhanshu Tiwari: “Faster than the speed of the light”, whereas it clearly showed us the basic concepts and approaches of the Numerical Relativity.
Even though I will focus on data analysis for the ground-based gravitational waves detectors, it was still very impressive to simulate the laser in the interferometers using Python which I have learned in the Simulation lectures. Besides lectures for the knowledge of gravitational waves, the outreach training was another challenge. However, it was so illuminating and gave us the methodologies to explain the scientific concepts using a proper way for the general public.
The first GraWIToN school did not only give us more than 100 hours of inspiring lectures, but also it brought all GraWIToN and other PhD program students together and provided a great opportunity to know each other. During the training school, although every day we switched between hotel, auditorium and canteen, I felt exciting that new knowledgecould keep coming into my brain.
As a bonus of the school, we enjoyed the mellow coffee and tasty food in the coffee break time which was one of the most exciting moments. Another bonus is that we can take our time to go around Pisa, to see the Leaning Tower, to image the scene of Galileo Galilei testing the Equivalence Principle on the Leaning Tower, to think about how Equivalence Principleis deeply effecting our perception to the physical world.
The training school is a turning point of my PhD program. In the past 6 months before it, I finished the foundational courses in Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI). Soon after I came back to GSSI from Pisa, I moved to Urbino and started my second stage of the PhD program. Here I will do research about data analysis with my advisor. Now I am reading some papers about data analysis and am trying to start doing some test analysis using Multi-Band Templated Analysis(MBTA), which can be used for the online analysis of the data from the gravitational waves interferometers.