AAPPS-DACG Workshop

Misao Sasaki and Sang Pyo Kim

The executive committee (EXCO) of the Division of Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravitation (DACG) decided to organize a DACG Workshop on astrophysics, cosmology and gravitation, given that the global pandemic of coronavirus forced the Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics (CosPA) Symposium 2020, sponsored by DACG, to be postponed to November 2021. Many researchers in the Asia Pacific region have been relatively isolated from outside universities or institutions, and the International Organizing Committee of all members of the EXCO and the Local Organizing Committee (Kiwoon Choi, Bogeun Gwak, Gungwon Kang, Sang Pyo Kim, Sungwon Kim) of the DACG Workshop anticipated that this event would encourage those researchers in the region to promote and disseminate their recent works, and to exchange ideas and communicate with each other. The DACG Workshop was hosted by the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (APCTP) as a hybrid online and onsite meeting from November 9 to 13, 2020. The workshop was attended by 213 participants. There were nineteen plenary speakers: Filipe B. Abdalla (University College London), Celine Boehm (Sydney University), Bernard Carr (Queen Mary University London), Chiang-Mei Chen (National Central University), Cheng-Wei Chiang (National Taiwan University), Ming-chung Chu (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Teruaki Enoto (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN)), Paul Ho (Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA)), Hongbo Hu (Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)), Shaun Hotchkiss (Auckland University), Kenta Hotokezaka (Tokyo University), Sang Hui Im (Institute for Basic Science (IBS)-Center for Theoretical Physics of the Universe (CTPU)), Aya Ishihara (Chiba University), Hyung Mok Lee (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), Seoul National University), Sherry Suyu (Max Planck Institute, Technical University Munich), Kent Yagi (University of Virginia), Masahito Yamazaki (Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU)), Shuang-Nan Zhang (IHEP, CAS), and Zong-Hong Zhu (Beijing Normal University). There were 53 oral presentations (Fig. 3).

The DACG together, with the Asia Pacific Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics Organization (AP CosPA Org.), awarded excellent presentations by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, for whom not more than 6 years had passed since the completion of their respective PhDs. The awards will include full support of local expenses at CosPA 2021 in Hong Kong, which will be endorsed by DACG. The program committee selected the seven awardees: Che-Yu Chen (Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica), Chan Park (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI)), Volodymyr Takhistov (Kavli IPMU, Tokyo University), Xueli Miao (Peking University), Jiajun Zhang (IBS-CTPU), Yusuke Mikura (Nagoya University), and Keigo Shimada (Tokyo Institute of Technology) (Figs. 4 and 5).

The DACG Workshop was followed by another workshop, Astroparticle: the next frontier of fundamental physics, which was organized by Stephen Appleby and Eoin Colgain of APCTP from November 16 to 19, 2020. This workshop brought together experts in the fields of astronomy and particle physics. The 24 invited speakers gave talks from the standard model of particle physics to cosmology.