Thursday at DAMOP was a little more broken up than usual for me at one of these meetings, because the nagging cold I have was bugging me more, and also because I needed to check my email a few times. There was still some neat stuff, though.<\/p>\n
The early-morning session was the toughest call of the meeting: there was the undergraduate research session<\/a>, a session on ultracold Rydberg atoms<\/a>, and a session on complicated states in BEC<\/a>, in widely spaced locations. I ended up skipping the undergraduate session in favor of hearing Chris Foot talk about a rotating optical lattice<\/a> (which simulates some condensed matter system that I couldn’t quite figure out), and Steve Rolston on the latest in ultra-cold plasmas<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the 10:30 session, I caught the first two talks on disorder in ultracold gases<\/a>, both on demonstrations of Anderson localization. The second talk in particular was very nice– it wasn’t Massimo Inguscio, but one of his post-docs, Benjamin Deissler. It’s cool to see cold atoms being used for such clear demonstrations of condensed matter phenomena.<\/p>\n The afternoon highlight, talk-wise, was a pair of talks about frequency combs, particularly the one by Ron Walsworth<\/a> about the “astro-comb” for the detection of new extrasolar planets. The idea is to use a stable frequency comb as a calibration source for spectroscopic measurements, which can improve the velocity sensitivity of the Doppler shift measurements to something like 10 cm\/s. This gets close to being able to detect Earth-sized planets around Sun-like stars in habitable orbits, which would be way cool.<\/p>\n After dinner with a bunch of Williams folks, I hurried back to campus to catch Diandra Leslie-Pelecky talking about NASCAR,<\/a> not so much because I care about auto racing, as because I hope to be in the public-lecture-giving position in a year or so, and I’d like to see how it’s done. She gave a really good talk, though a fair number of the jokes were aimed at physicists. The book (which I was reading on the plane on the way down) is also very good.<\/p>\n And that’s more or less it for Thursday. I’m going to be earlier tonight, in hopes of being better rested and less congested tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thursday at DAMOP was a little more broken up than usual for me at one of these meetings, because the nagging cold I have was bugging me more, and also because I needed to check my email a few times. There was still some neat stuff, though. The early-morning session was the toughest call of… Continue reading DAMOP Day Two<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,36,7,51,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-condensed_matter","category-meetings","category-physics","category-physics_books","category-quantum_optics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}