The Sino-German Symposium on Gravitational Physics was held in AEI, Hannover during 14-16, September, 2015. The meeting was co-organized by Prof. Gerhard Heinzel from the Albert Einstein Institute, Hannover, Germany and Prof. Wu Yueliang and Prof. Liu Runqiu from the gravitational physics consortium of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) comprising a number of institutes of CAS. The meeting was also supported by the Sino-German Center set up jointly by the DFG in Germany and the NSFC in China.
By gathering leading experts from both China and Germany, along with those from other European countries and USA, the meeting aimed at discussing the state of the art in gravitational detection in space as well as the observation of the Earth gravity field from space using laser interferometry. The topic of gravitational wave detection in space was the primary focus of the meeting as it may open a new window in astronomy that is expected to explain a host of extreme phenomena in our Universe, the observation of which is to a large extent impossible by the present electromagnetic observations.
Prof. Karsten Danzmann, Director of the Albert Einstein Institute Hannover, Max Planck Society, and Prof. Wu Yueliang, UCAS Vice-President, delivered opening speeches on behalf of each side. 15 presentations were given by Chinese experts with about 30 presentations given by European experts. About 100 participants attended the symposium, including about 20 students and young scientists from the AEI Hannover and leading experts from Italy, France, Spain, UK, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, ESA and NASA.
The high-quality presentations covered a wide range of topics concerning gravitational physics in space, in particular the detection of gravitational waves with a LISA-like mission and the observation of the Earth gravity field with a next generation GRACE-like mission. Both of these are currently studied intensively worldwide, and concrete plans for their implementation will come out soon. Being strongly interested in both of them, CAS has started intense and mostly independent investigations so far.
