The arrow of the time is thought to be irreversible, but also makes you move quickly, and suddenly you realize that it will be half a year since you initiated this amazing adventure very soon. Lots of things have happened in this time, but the most exciting has been the 1st GraWIToN school held at EGO-VIRGO place.
An accretion disk in a binary system, one of the topics that trapped my attention.
Image from (A. Possenti's presentation during GraWIToN school)
In many aspects, the school has been amazing, but first of all, I really liked the opportunity that we had to discover the efforts done by the community to discover the GWs and meet all the students of the school and the GraWIToN students for first time, that we are going to be the future in the research of GWs. In my case, being in the Simulation programme mainly focused in optics, the opportunity I had to learn general relativity has been a great point of the school. I confess that I had never learnt anything about general relativity, so don't ask me if I knew about the GWs in the past!
But once the school was finished, it was time to apply the acquired knowledge in our research.
In my case, after the school, it was time to change the area that I'm learning, changing from optics of the GW detectors, to computer graphics which is going to be a big part of my work. But why? You may think that computer graphics is something intended to be used in video games and animation industry mainly, and you're right, but there's been a big effort into the computer graphics research to implement the behaviour of the light in a realistic way. This gives us a powerful tool that has not been used until now to explore possible sources of noise in GW detectors (and for sure more areas of science); so it's been time to discover how this can be done!
Moment of our presentation at Teatro Sant'Andrea. Image from Twitter: @EGO_VIRGO
Finally, the first week of June, together with Matthieu, we had our first collaboration in an outreach event organized by EGO with high schools students. We explained them our experience as researchers that have moved from their natal countries to start a project in Pisa. I confess that since I knew I had to do it, I was desiring to do it. I remember how before I started physics, I had the opportunity to assist to some similar events that motivated me to join a physics degree in the university. In addition of our presentation we watch a representation of the live of Marie Skłodowska-Curie, a great woman who had to fight against the prejudices of a world of men. I hope we did a good job this day inspiring a future scientist that one day will say #IamAScientistBecause and we continue going #BeyondMarieCurie.