On 23 March 2018 the Board of Directors approved INAF's participation in the LOFAR project by coordinating the establishment of a national consortium, LOFAR IT.
On 16 April 2018 the International Board of LOFAR formally accepted LOFAR IT, coordinated and represented by INAF, as Full Member of the LOFAR collaboration
(http://www.media.inaf.it/2018/04/16/litalia-fa-ancor-piu-grande-lofar/).< br>The Italian participation includes an important technological contribution and the installation of a new generation LOFAR station in 2021-2022.
On 14 May 2018 the Scientific Directorate appointed a National LOFAR Committee (LOFAR IT Board) which has the mandate to guide Italian participation in LOFAR using the guidelines approved by the Board of Directors as a reference.
At the moment LOFAR is a collaboration between 8 countries structured in 6 Key Science Projects (KSP) :
- Epoch of Reionisation
- Deep Extragalactic surveys
- Transient sources
- Ultra high energy cosmic rays
- Solar science and space weather< /strong>
- Cosmic magnetism
(http://www.lofar.org/astronomy/key-science/lofar-key-science-projects).
In addition to 65 hours of guaranteed time per year that can be dedicated to Italian projects, interested Italian researchers can ask to participate in the KSPs.
The purpose of this email is to get started to gather interest from new research groups or individual researchers who want to actively contribute to the LOFAR KSPs. Interested parties (coordinators of groups or individual researchers) must send a short motivation (approximately 1 page) describing the scientific cases of interest, the research projects to be developed within the KSP, the resources available to be dedicated to the projects ( FTE, students) and the possible availability of data complementary to that of the KSP.
Requests must be sent to
The LOFAR IT Board will contact interested groups and sponsor their participation in the KSPs in appropriate locations. By joining the KSPs, researchers will have access to the KSPs' long-guaranteed data to conduct their own research programs within the KSPs' organizational policies, they will independently establish collaborations and will be able to take on leadership roles within the KSPs themselves.
It is also important to mention in this email that LOFAR IT will make available a distributed computational infrastructure dedicated to LOFAR data analysis on which the pipelines for data analysis will be installed and kept updated. This aims to provide the community with all the tools necessary for data analysis as well as technical support from a team of technicians and researchers distributed nationwide.
In order to establish a progressive entry into the KSP by interested individual researchers and research groups, a second Call for Interest will be published in December 2018.
Further clarifications can be requested by writing to LOFAR-IT@ inaf.it .
Kind regards
Ugo Becciani
Gianfranco Brunetti (chair)
Federica Govoni (UTGII coordinator)
Jader Monari
Roberto Scaramella