The highlight of Day 2 of DAMOP was, obviously, the special Undergraduate Research session. OK, it's possible that I'm only saying that because one of my students was talking in that session...
Mike did a really good job with his talk, though there were a couple of phrases in there that I would've preferred not to hear in the final talk... The other two talks that I heard were also excellent, and as the session chair said, if that's the future of science, the future looks good.
In the present of science, there were some really good talks in the morning sessions. Ian Spielman of NIST gave a really nice talk about BEC's in optical lattices that reminded me of stuff I did as a post-doc, only their data were much cleaner than ours ever were, and they could actually do direct comparisons to theory. That's what happens when you work in a regime where there are nice and convenient approximations that you can make...
Johannes Denschlag gave a good talk in that same session about making molecules with fermionic atoms in a lattice, which was pretty cool. I'm not sure I followed all of it, but it was technically impressive.
I ditched the last talk in that session in favor of Aephraim Steinberg's talk about three-photon entangled states, which started off with a really good Generic Physics Talk outline:
- Introduction: Introductory material, including an outline.
- Some Gratuitous Controversy: A couple of controversial statements to wake up the people who are starting to doze off.
- Experimental Graphs That Go By Too Fast to Follow: Pretty self-explanatory, really...
The serious part of the talk was really good, too, raising some interesting questions about what entanglement really means in the context of photons, which by definition don't really interact with one another. I need to think about that some more.
And,of course, I indulged my fascination with precision measurements by watching the talk from Claire Cramer from the torsion pendulum group at the University of Washington. I'm constantly hyping their experiments, just because I think the things they do are incredibly cool in a really nerdy way. For example, in the spin-dependent force experiment she was describing, they stack lead bricks on one side of their apparatus to compensate for the gravitational force of the hill behind the building their lab in in. Any experiment that has to worry about systematic effects at that level and still produces reliable results is pretty damn cool, as far as I'm concerned.
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Love that last one. Do they correct for the diurnal variation of the number of vehicles in the parking lot and staff in offices?
Hill behind the physics department at UW? Hm, that's a small hill, so even more impressive. How long before they have to worry about whether the university draw bridge is up or down. I have a desire to sit still just thinking about it.
Hill behind the physics department at UW? Hm, that's a small hill, so even more impressive.
Actually, all there stuff is at CENPA (the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics) which is across campus next to a somewhat larger hill. The one that always struck me was one of their pendula which sits on lead feet, with electronic bits that heat up when you run current through them (for which I can't remember the name). The thermal expansion of the lead feet corrects for the diurnal thermal expansion of the hill they sit on. The best part is that they refer to it as "feetback". And regarding the diurnal variation of staff in offices, I've been told by a friend who works in that group that several years back they calibrated one of their instruments partly by having an undergrad walk in and out of the room every two hours.
Bah, those italics were only supposed to be on the first, quoted, line. That'll teach me to post comments without previewing.