11th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (AMALDI 11)

Abstract

The 11th Amaldi Conference on gravitational waves was held from June 21 to 26, 2016 in Gwangju, Korea. This meeting was sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), Korean Astronomical Society, Korean Physical Society, Korean Federation of Science and Technology (KOFST), National Research Foundation (NRF), Korea Tourism Organism, and Gwangju Convention Bureau.More than 150 scientists from 26 countries attended the 11th Amaldi Confernece. Although there was an outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) just before the conference, there were very little cancellations. There was no incident related to the MERS disease.The scientific program, including the list of the invited plenary speakers, was arranged by the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC) chaired by Eugenio Coccia. Most of the communication between the GWIC and the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) was handled by Stan Whitcomb, general secretary of the GWIC. There were 10 plenary sessions and 13 parallel sessions. Two plenary sessions were held each morning from Monday to Friday while the afternoon was devoted to parallel sessions. A special lecture for the participants of the meeting on ultra-high intensity lasers was delivered by Chang Hee Nam, director of the Center for Relativistic Laser Science located at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology. Bernard Schutz gave a public talk entitled “Listening to Black Holes and the Big Bang - the Oldest Concert of the Universe” in the evening on June 23. More than 250 students and general public attended this talk.Most of the topics ranging from detector instruments, data analysis, to astrophysics and source modeling were covered in 10 invited talks, 67 contributed oral presentations, and 39 posters.After the conference, we invited all participants to submit written papers for proceedings. We received 35 papers and went through the peer review process and accepted 34 papers for publications. We are grateful to the referees for their careful review and useful comments.The 11th Amaldi Conference will be remembered as the last one before the first detection of gravitational wave event, GW150914. We hope that gravitational wave science will become much more mature with this detection and the forthcoming Amaldi conferences will continue to provide a most extensive venue for communication among the scientists working on various aspects of gravitational waves.