LOIS - LOFAR i Skandinavien

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 och LOFAR

LOFAR är ett gigantiskt sameuropeiskt distribuerat radioobservatorium som håller på att färdigställas i Europa. LOIS är ett skandinaviskt projekt som avser att utveckla mätmetoderna hos LOFAR så att de bättre passar för studier av den nära rymden, från atmosfären till solen. Kartan till vänster visar ett tänkbart LOIS-system vid full utbyggnad. En tidig teststation, som togs i bruk 2003 i Växjö, kan ses på bilden nedan. En andra, mer komplett prototyp är under uppbyggnad i Ronneby, i samarbete med Blekinge Tekniska Högskola. Mer information om LOIS finns på this page, och i LOIS-brochyren (pdf).

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.