OK, last things first. The UVa campus gets an overall grade of gorgeous, allowing for the construction that was going on. (There was a very New England “you can’t get there from here” theme that pretty much mandated that any travel between buildings required a detour of some sort) The weather was great; pretty much the rest of the month in Virginia has been cool and wet, but it was sunny and warm the whole week. I had tried to stay at one of the motels within walking distance, but they were all full when I called, so I ended up at the not-so-super-8 (or, from after Clark Kent went into the molecule chamber) and driving in each morning.
There was an announced crowd of over 1,000 registered participants, which explains the occasional SRO crowds for some of the talks. Holding a conference of this size in a University setting forces a certain spatial distribution of the talks, so there were six parallel session in four different buildings. Add to that the talks being located along the southern part of the campus, while the parking garage and closest concentration of restaurants along the northern part, it made for a bit of walking. Which is a good thing, because the snacks that were provided was not exactly in the health-food category. One morning there was the matrix of donuts, including chocolate-covered ones covered with mini M&Ms (yes, it was tasty). There was also free beer at all of the poster sessions. Not surprisingly, these were well-attended. Too well, perhaps — the cacophony made it hard to hold a conversation at times, and it was tough to navigate the aisles.
Since I hadn’t been to this meeting since 2000, I’ve missed out on some of the incremental progress in many of the fields, so a lot was brand-new. The hot topics of today seem to include investigations into condensed-matter physics, with experiments using paired Fermions to form Bosons, and looking at the transition between Bose-Einstein Condensates and Cooper-Pair BCS superfluids. And a lot of talks about optical lattices, which now always seem to be far off-resonant traps.
Other than the Thesis Prize session, which included an atomic clock talk, and the optical frequency comb session, there weren’t a lot of talks that held any particular work-related interest for me, so I mostly stuck to a basic strategy of attending sessions that had invited talks; the speakers tend to give a bit of an overview which provides some context for the rest of the talk. That only failed me for last session, where five minutes of prep on cold molecule formation was not going to help me decipher what was going on.
Between my long absence, and that almost all of the atomic physics people I know being in the atomic clock field and not in attendance, I didn’t really know too many people at the meeting. I did re-introduce myself to a few people whom I know I had met, and I also waylaid a fellow blogger (one guess who that was) but, in turn, I was recognized by Arjendu. And I met people giving posters and at the banquet.
I had decided that driving back on Saturday afternoon was probably a Bad Idea™ and had arranged my motel accordingly. I ended up going to a local park on Saturday afternoon, surrounding a lake near the airport, and after clearing out the four geocaches, I spent a while filming wildlife in slow-motion.
