The LIGO journal club usually meets at 3:00PM on Fridays on 2nd floor of W Bridge (room 265). We meet to discuss a recent journal article from PRL, ApJ or the like. Someone is designated as a lead, to initiate the discussion, but not to present slides or give a monologue. The lead should also post a link to the article the Tuesday before meeting in the Meetings and papers section below.

Preferably, selected articles won't be exceptionally long, and would relate (at least tangentially) to LIGO.

You will be emailed by the journal club Tsar two weeks out from your date and again a week out. The rotating roster can be found at HERE

Pandemic Time Zoom Meetings

This is the recurring zoom link for our virtual Journal Clubs ( https://caltech.zoom.us/j/620707875) still at 3 PM on Fridays. The password is the same as our teamspeak pwd for form.mit.edu.

Mailing List

To send emails to everyone: ligo-journal-club@caltech.edu

Click here to subscribe

Meetings and papers

Past meetings (archival)

Journal club roster 2018

You can find an ordered list of upcoming presenters HERE. The JCTsar script will chose people in this order.

If you find you can't do a week that you are assigned to then find someone willing to trade and update that spreadsheet.

Highlighted papers pool

If we are short of a presenter we will draw something from this list of papers. If you find any papers that would be interesting to discuss at future journal club meetings, then you should add them to the list on the following page:

Interesting papers

Older papers on this list can be found in the Interesting papers (archive) page.

Chooser script (Updated python)

https://github.com/fincle/RoboTsar

The python script TsarMailer.py downloads the google spreadsheet list. This sheet contains an ordered list of names and a list of public holidays to veto. It counts the number of days since the start of the year, vetoing public holidays and chooses presenters sequentially from the list. The scripts loops back to the beginning once the end is reached. An arbitrary phase shift is also added to the week number so that the list position can be twiddled in the event the presenter list length changes and position needs to be fixed.

If a swap of names is performed leaving the list length the same there is no need to adjust the phase factor.

Three other scripts exist to remind the presenter to post a paper and to remind people on the day.

Reorganization and topics

We are looking to shake up the structure of journal club by focusing attention on singular themes for month periods. The idea is to develop a deeper understanding of each topic rather than dipping into topics at random.

Please edit this section with any ideas and suggestions as we figure out exactly what we are going to cover.

Some suggested themes Experimental: - Thermal noise topics - Quantum mechanics in GW detectors and optimal detector design - Seismic cloaking and novel 'feed forward' reduction of seismic noise - Alternaive GW detectors (i.e. not laser interferometry)

Data and astrophysics: - GW sources and astrophysics of a particular class of stars (i.e. Kilonovae, pulsars etc) - Cosmology and GW detection topic (GW CMB, early universe remnants?) - Exotic blackhole high energy physics coming out of GW detection - Glitches and detector characterization (machine learning stuff too?) - Bayesian statistics and optimal parameter extraction

Other: - Effective outreach and evidence based teaching - Diversity in physics