2009 Annual Meeting of the California Section of the
American Physical Society (APS)
by Katie Klein, University of California, Santa Cruz
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Author Katie Klein (back row, middle) with other conference attendees.
Image courtesy Katie Klein. |
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“Advances in science are seldom made alone,” stated Nobel laureate Douglas Osheroff at a recent California-Nevada section of APS meeting. “Don’t spend your time reinventing what we already know. Use the tools and technology we have.” Osheroff, who discovered the superfluid properties of 3He, doesn’t seem too far off, as the meeting itself showed. With around 80 presenters from ten fields and plenary talks from experimentalists, inventors, and theorists, collaborations and idea sharing thrived.
One of the first presentations was by Darin Kinion from Lawrence Livermore National Labs, who spoke about quantum mechanical systems. Since I had taken quantum mechanics classes but had not been introduced to quantum computing, this talk was really interesting! “If you have a Hamiltonian,” said Kinion, “you can make a circuit that reflects it.” Turning an imaginary mathematical operator into a circuit? Cool! He then explained some of the complications in making these systems, such as entanglement and uncertainty, and their anticipated uses. One of these uses is to assist in cryptography by prime number factoring. This drew some concern from the audience, mostly with respect to the privacy of bank accounts, but Kinion explained that while quantum computing may be able to help decrypt codes, any additional amount of code would make decryption time much longer.
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An anechoic room at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Electrical Engineering department).
Photo by Arnaud Dessein |
In the parallel sessions, lower- and upper-division undergrads, graduate students, and post-docs presented their work. Eric Oviatt from the Naval Postgraduate School began his talk by turning on a speaker in front of which hung a ping-pong ball. I watched as the ping-pong ball was drawn toward the speaker due to what Oviatt calls “acoustic attraction” (try it!). Following his presentation, he invited all interested audience members to visit the school’s anechoic chamber (“an”- without, “echo”- as in sound). With a few of my classmates I followed him to a room whose walls were covered with wedge-shaped structures made of plexi-glass fibers and wire. The floor upon which we were standing was no floor at all; it was only a strong piece of wire fencing. The bottom of the room was another eight feet below and was also covered with the wedges. True to its name, the room muffled all echoes, making it eerily muted. After turning on two noise sources, we roamed through the room, listening to the aural interference patterns.
The next day’s parallel sessions featured gravitational supersolids and spin glass, railguns and cytoskeletons. Members of solar energy projects also discussed efficient energy plans and opened the floor to take audience questions and suggestions. Douglas Osheroff gave an invited talk, sharing many humorous stories. After finding an opportunity to ask his future wife on a date, he recalled, “I quickly invited her to the most romantic event of the season: the physics department picnic.” He also discussed his work. In one case, he remembered, “All of the data was correct, but everything we said about it was wrong. It flew through the review process!” He later admonished the audience to “note the predictions of the theorists, but don’t trust them to be correct.” He then discussed his 3He discovery, noting first that when the data seemed a little funny in two places, he dubbed them “glitch one” and “glitch two,” not knowing that there was a reason for them! After a while, though, he realized that he had found something important. “I called up my thesis adviser at 4:00 in the morning,” he told us. “You really have to be sure of yourself to do that!”
In conclusion, the meeting was a great experience. I am thoroughly and unendingly impressed with the works of my peers. If you have an opportunity to attend or present your work at a conference, do it! It’s wonderful. Happy New Year! Study well! |
