LOIS - the LOFAR Outrigger In Scandinavia
 LOIS News
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The 7th LOIS workshop, focusing on new
radio methods for studying space, was held in Växjö, June 16-18,
2008.
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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.
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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 and LOFAR
LOIS is the Scandinavian Earth and space observing extension to LOFAR,
currently under construction in northwestern Europe. The map on the
right shows the planned distribution of the LOIS system. A part of
the LOIS test station near Växjö in southern Sweden can be seen in
the picture 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 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.
LOIS Status
Following a one-year system field test and calibration with one
antenna/radio unit installed in October, 2003, at the LOIS (LOFAR
Outrigger in Scandinavia) test station site in the Växjö area,
Kronoberg County, southern Sweden, a full test station array was
deployed in the autumn of 2004 and has been up
and running continuously ever since. Luckily, it survived the
devastating hurricane which hit the area on January 8, 2005.
Scientific data from the test station array have been collected
since December, 2004. They are currently being analysed. Some
of the results have already been presented at international
conferences and are published in the literature.
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