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pontiff | February 18, 2010The twelfth annual SqUINt conference is being held this week and unfortunately I'm missing my favorite conference (though a gaggle of grad students have been sent Santa Fe bound.) The schedule looks really good this year including a great list of invited speakers (Scott Aaronson (MIT), Rainer Blatt (Innsbruck), Matt Hastings (Station Q), Dieter Meschede (Bonn), Keith Schwab (Caltech), and John Watrous (Waterloo)). Notice the awesome mix of theory and experiment...good stuff. Hope everyone who is attending is having a fantastic time: have some green chiles for me please.
pontiff | February 20, 2009Okay, so keeping running notes on friendfeed isn't going to work for me. Just too hard to do this and make a readable record. Really we should just be taping the talks.
Summary of day one below the fold (this may be a bit off as this is being written a day later.)
Jack Harris, Optomechanical systems
Papers: arXiv:0811.1343, arXiv:0707.1724.
Jack talked about his cool work coupling optical systems to mechanical systems. Take a cavity and stick a mechanical system (a dielectric membrane of thickness 50nm and quality factor of about a million) into it. Jack showed how you could cool the…