1. principles
  2. In Praise of AMO Physics

In Praise of AMO Physics

By drorzel on June 9, 2015.

I'm at DAMOP this week, though it took longer to get here than it should've-- severe storms yesterday canceled the flight I was supposed to take from Baltimore to Columbus, so I had to rebook to the 6am departure this morning, whee. I think this is the first time I've ever had a flight canceled while I was at the airport, though which is kind of amazing.

Anyway, I missed most of the morning session, and I'm short on sleep, but I saw some cool talks already, and expect to write about some of them tomorrow. For the moment, though, here's a post I wrote for Forbes yesterday talking about why Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics is a great subfield to work in, and not just a refuge for people who couldn't hack it as particle physicists. This skews very heavily toward experimental AMO, too, because that's my background, but AMO theory has a lot of nice features, too.

And now it's just about time for the next batch of talks to start, so I'm off to hear more about awesome physics involving atoms...

Tags
Atoms and Molecules
conferences
Physics
Science

More like this

Why So Many Blogging Astronomers?
Over in Discover-land, Razib has a couple of posts about the content of science blogs, based on an analysis of the content of the top science blogs according to Wikio. Razib's second post is sparked by a pointed question from the author of the original study: I'm now curious to find out why there…
Hot Topics and Controversies
The Dave Bacon post linked earlier today is actually the beginning of a plug for Doug Natelson's list of hot topics and controversies in condensed matter and nanoscale science. As was suggested in a recent comment, now that a nonzero number of condensed matter and nano people are (apparently)…
What's So Interesting About AMO Physics?
That's the title of my slightly insane talk at the DAMOP (Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society) conference a couple of weeks ago, summarizing current topics of interest in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. I'll re-embed the slides at the end of…
DonorsChoose Payoff: Why AMO Physics?
Months ago, during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I offered to answer questions from people who donated to the Challenge. I then promptly forgot to respond to the questions sent in. Mea maxima culpa. Here's a way-too-late response to a good question from "tcmJOE": I've spent the past few years trying…