The “ICTP-AP 2021 and Gravitational Wave Summer School” sponsored by ICTP-AP and Taiji Laboratory was successfully held in Beijing from July 15 to 21, 2021. Students from more than 30 universities and research institutes across China went to Beijing to participate in this activity and successfully graduated.

At the opening ceremony, Yong Xie, Director of International Cooperation Department of UCAS, brought the First Lesson of School to the students. He talked about the development and innovation of higher education of CAS from 1950s, and brought everyone a comprehensive understanding of UCAS, an innovative university with the integration of science and education as the school mode, postgraduate education as the principle and elite undergraduate education as the school characteristics.

Professor Congfeng Qiao, Secretary General of Taiji Consortium, welcomed all the students and introduced the development of Taiji Programme for space gravitational wave detection. He said that it was a long and arduous undertaking to explore the scientific frontier related to gravitational wave, and all students present might be the mainstay of gravitational wave detection in the future, so students need to constantly strengthen their fundamental scientific knowledge and learn about the scientific frontier subjects to lay a solid foundation for future research.

In the following week,17 experts and teachers were invited to give more than 20 lectures on gravitation, black holes and quantum universe, gravitational wave detection and precision measurement technology, and discussed about the frontier of theoretical physics science with the students.

Students were discussing questions with teachers after classes

At the closing ceremony on the July 21, Academician Yueliang Wu, director of ICTP-AP, gave a lecture on the frontier of gravitational universe and the essence of time and space. He introduced the latest scientific research achievements of “Taiji-1”, the first satellite of Taiji Programme: “Taiji-1” team had put forward the proposal of using “Taiji-LISA” for networking observation for the first time in the world, which was expected to improve the accuracy of Hubble constant to 0.5%, to locate the position of gravitational wave source faster and more accurately, and improve the accuracy by four orders of magnitude. Taiji-1 has completed all preset experimental tasks and achieved the highest precision space laser interferometry in China. It has completed all the performance verification of micro-newton radio frequency ion propulsion and hall-effect micro thruster technology for the first time in the world. It has taken the lead in realizing the breakthrough of two kinds of drag-free control technologies in China, and the sensing accuracy and range of gravitational reference sensor reached the best compared with others in the same level in China, meeting the needs of Taiji-2 and approaching the needs of Taiji-3 in the future.

 In the ever-changing era, we hope all the students will have great ambitions, be courageous and strive for the development of foundamental sciences.