Some late nights and wireless problems conspired to keep me from posting anything Friday or Saturday, but I was still at the meeting, and saw some cool talks on coherent X-ray production with lasers, opto-mechanics, and ridiculously good atomic clocks, some of which I hope to talk about later. For the moment, I'm just enjoying being home with Kate and SteelyKid and Emmy, so a real wrap-up post with physics content will have to wait a bit.
I will put up a quick note that I'll be signing books one week from today as part of the Authors Alley program at the World Science Festival. More on that later. For the moment, I have a dog and a toddler who demand some attention.
More like this
I'm terrible about taking notes on conference talks, especially when I'm jet-lagged and was sleep deprived even before I got on the plane. I do jot down the occasional paper reference, though, so here are the things I wrote down, and the talks they were associated with.
It's been a few weeks since my last summary of physics posts I've been doing at Forbes, so here's the latest eclectic collection:
The APS March meeting is next week as 10000 physicists invade Portland, Oregon. I hope Powell's bookstore has stocked their science sections well!
In which I unpack a cryptic paper title and explain how quantum superposition lets you use light to keep things from interacting with light.
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NIF makes coherent x-rays? I wondered if they would get any Star Warrior results out of that machine.
It's not a NIF thing-- these are tabletop laser systems. They're soft x-rays-- just over 500 eV-- but generated by fast-pulsed lasers that fit on a normal optical table.