LOIS - the LOFAR Outrigger In Scandinavia

LOIS News

• IBM and IRF/LOIS announces a major new e-Science collaborative project in space weather research, 3 June, 2009.
• Uppsala University appoints Lars Ladell as visiting professor in Space Physics, to supplement the LOIS effort, 19 May, 2009.
• New York Times and International Herald Tribune publishes an on-line article and an interview on our use of the new IBM System S/InfoSphere Streams software for analysing data from LOIS 2009-05-20
• The first Swedish LOFAR Science Interest meeting, focusing on Swedish interests in LOFAR, LOIS and SKA, was held in Stockholmx, 15 January, 2009.
• On 5 December, 2008, the funding agency VINNOVA (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems) , granted the LOIS project 0.5 MSEK for the development of a new generation of digital four-channel radio sensors for high-speed (125 Ms/s), high-dynamic range (16 bit resolution) real-time sampling of electromagnetic field vectors.
• The 7th LOIS workshop, focusing on new radio methods for studying space, was held in Växjö, June 16-18, 2008.
• Through an agreement with the Blekinge Institute of Technology, a second LOIS station will be built near the city of Ronneby in the county Blekinge, located in the south-east corner of Sweden approximately 100 km due south of the current Växjô LOIS test station.
• On August 24, 2007, Physical Review Letters published our article Utilization of Photon Orbital Angular Momentum in the Low-Frequency Radio Domain which describes the breakthrough radio methods that have been developed in the LOIS project. See also the arxiv.org version. This paper is the "top story" of this particular Phys. Rev. Lett. issue and has one of our figures, prepared by two undergraduate diploma students in our group, on the cover.

LOIS, IRF, and LOFAR

LOIS is a project intiated and led by the Physics in Space programme of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) in Uppsala. The objective is to develop new observational modes and methodics to optimise and extend the Earth and space observing capabilities of the large radio infrastructure LOFAR, currently under construction in northwestern Europe. A test station where the basic LOIS ideas have been developed, was in operation from 2003 until 2009 in Växjö in southern Sweden. A new digital vector sensing antenna/radio unit was developed 2008-2009 and will be used at the second LOIS station, in Ronneby, Sweden. This station will be the first prototype and at a later stage the Växjö station will be upgraded to the same level. A high-speed IT backbone connecting the Ronneby and Växjö stations will allow long-base interferometry of a new kind, based on the utilisation of new angular momentum degrees of freedomg. The map on the right shows a possible future distribution of the LOIS system. A picture of the LOIS test station near Växjö can be seen below. More information on LOIS can be found on this page, and in the LOIS brochure (pdf).

LOFAR was originally designed as the world's first software defined and most sensitive observatory for low radio frequencies (10-240 MHz), but has now evolved into a generic sensor network for on-line Earth and space observations. Information on LOFAR can be found on www.lofar.org, and in the LOFAR brochure (pdf).

LOIS in Växjö

LOIS Space Centre, an initiative of the "Physics in Space" (PHiSP) research programme of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, is operated by the School of Mathemathics and Systems Engineering (MSI) of Växjö University, one of the largest universities in southern Sweden with about 16000 students. LOIS Space Centre has its offices at, and is sponsored by, Videum Science Park.

LOIS in Ronneby

In collaboration with the Ronneby Municipality, the Blekinge Institute of Technology (in Swedish: Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, BTH) has agreed to provide infastructure and other support in order to establish the LOIS Ronneby prototype station in Angelskog, five kilometres away from the BTH Oktagonen premises where advanced computing, network and other IT equipement have been installed. The deployment of old and new typse of sensors at the Angelskog site will commence during the spring of 2009.

LOIS and IBM

In fierce world-wide competition LOIS managed in 2004 to win one of IBM's few Shared University Research (SUR) grants. The SUR grant has been used for the procurement of high-performance computer hardware (a cluster of two IBM Blade Centers with 56 CPUs) for LOIS data handling, analysis and simulations. In 2006, LOIS won its second SUR grant, allowing a major upgrade of the system for higher I/O and much larger storage capacity. LOIS and IBM Research has established research collaboration in several areas, including scalable data stream management, sensor networks, computer modelling, and distributed computing. This collaboration allows LOIS researchers to use the world's fastest supercomputer BlueGene and also extends into the planned Lunar Infrastructure For Exploration project which aims at building a large low-frequency radio telescope on the far side of the moon based on LOIS' innovative radio technology.