Friday at DAMOP ended up being more about socialization than science. I went to a few talks, but there wasn’t that much on the program that looked exciting, and I had to spend some time in the middle of the day grading papers and dealing with some panicky emails from students.
As a result, the highlights of the day mostly involved talking to people. I spent a little while talkinging to frequent commenter Perry Rice about his poster, and quantum optics in general. Ron Walsworth offered a couple of suggestions for blog topics, including a couple of applications of frequency combs to astrophysics, that I’ll talk about more later. I heard a True Lab Story that I won’t repeat, because it’s too painful, and I spent a while talking with Robert Fletcher, who’s the grad student currently using the apparatus that I worked on when I was in graduate school. It’s nice to hear that the apparatus is still working, and still has some of the same quirks that I remember from back in the day. I also heard about a surprising tenure decision at my alma mater.
In a weird way, this sort of thing is almost as important as the actual science. Particularly in a small-ish field like AMO physics, it’s important to maintain some connection to the community– in addition to purely social things, I talked a bit with people who may be taking some of our students in the future, and with a few other faculty at small colleges who share some common concerns.
(As an aside, a couple of years ago in Lincoln, I was talking with another small college guy, who suggested that we ought to form a Small College Group, sort of along the lines of the Precision Measurements group (who totally dropped the ball this year by not providing pizza). This is one of those things that sounds like a good idea– there are a fair number of common concerns and problems that apply to small colleges in general– but I really wouldn’t want to be the person doing the heavy lifting required to put it together. I may suggest it as a symposium topic or some such for next year, though…)
There were talks scheduled for Saturday morning, but my flight out was at 11:00, so I couldn’t get to any of them. Had I known I would be spending four hours in O’Hare, I might’ve tried for a later flight out (I’m not sure there is one) so I could see Chris Westbrook’s talk on Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiments with atoms, but I didn’t know that at the time.
All in all, it was a good conference. It was a bit smaller than the last couple of years, and some of the people I usually look forward to seeing weren’t there, probably because it was also on the expensive side. There wasn’t an obvious important theme, either, the way there sometimes is– a few years back everybody was talking about vortices in BEC, and there was another year where every talk seemed to involve BEC/BCS crossover physics. This year was a little more scattered, at least from what I saw. It’s possible that there was some really hot development in molecular spectroscopy or ion interactions, but I don’t really follow those sub-fields.
Next year’s meeting will be at Penn State, May 27-31. Mark your calendars.