I'll get to the much-delayed Friday summary shortly. But first, the Nerds of the Purple Cow:
That picture (courtesy of Justin Brown) shows twelve of the thirteen Williams graduates attending this year's DAMOP, in order of class year, from Paul Hess '08 on the left (who technically only graduated yesterday) to Tom Gallagher of UVA on the far right. Dan Kleppner of MIT had left before Tiku Majumder got the picture set up, but if you include him, we spanned 55 years of graduating classes.
Given that the school only graduates 10-ish physics majors a year, that's a pretty impressive showing, and a testament to the quality of the faculty and their commitment to getting undergrads involved in research. And yes, I am six inches taller than anybody else in that picture.
But you don't want to hear my blathering about Williams matters, you want to know more about the state of atomic physics...
Friday morning was another run-between-talks morning, starting out at the reduced dimension session to hear Pierre Clade talk about the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition (which I still don't entirely get). Then I headed to another building to catch Hughes de Riedmatten talking about quantum memory, then back to the Nittany Lion for some caffeine before checking out John Doyle's talk on trapping polar molecules. Doyle's buffer-gas cooling technique is another of those experiments that I am perhaps unduly impressed with-- I'm always faintly surprised that more people don't do it. It's probably a lot more complicated than it looks.
The second morning session was a little calmer, as I stayed in the same room for two talks on entangling neutral atoms, by Trey Porto and Antoine Browaeys. I had heard a lot of Trey's stuff before, but it's still cool, and Antoine gave an excellent talk about a system for trapping single atoms in individual traps a few microns apart.After that, I ran downstairs to see Steve Rolston and one of his students talk about cold plasmas (as mentioned previously on this blog).
After lunch, I opted for Something Completely Different, and went to the astrobiology session, to hear about extrasolar planets and the spectroscopic signatures that might tell us if there's life on those distant worlds. Then I swung back to hear about BEC's in lattices from a former guest-blogger, and then declared myself done with talks for the meeting.
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Your blather about Williams was interesting, since I know it is one of (if not the) top producer of BS physics majors in the 4-year world. I also found the demographics of that group interesting. Is that typical of the BS group, or does this reflect the well-known changes that happen in grad school?
PS - I would have really liked to see the talk on cold anti-H atoms. That would make a good future blog topic.
Your blather about Williams was interesting, since I know it is one of (if not the) top producer of BS physics majors in the 4-year world. I also found the demographics of that group interesting. Is that typical of the BS group, or does this reflect the well-known changes that happen in grad school?
My knowledge of their recent classes is pretty limited. It's fairly typical of the demographics 15 years ago, at least from what I remember. But we're in "statistics of small numbers" territory, here.
I would have really liked to see the talk on cold anti-H atoms. That would make a good future blog topic.
I had vaguely planned to do a set of posts exploring some of the things I saw at DAMOP in more detail, but it's not looking like I'll be able to do those real soon, what with all the other stuff going on at the moment.