Common ground for physicists

Boston Common and the Park Street Church, part of the city’s “Freedom Trail”.

By Margaret Harris at the APS March Meeting in Boston

The American Physical Society’s March Meeting doesn’t really kick off until tomorrow morning, but with many of the 6000+ delegates arriving a day early, we’re rapidly heading towards a critical mass of physicists here in Boston. Even the good citizens of New England’s largest city are starting to notice the influx; as I was walking along the “Freedom Trail” of historic landmarks earlier today, I met a park ranger who estimated that I was 10th physicist he’d spoken to that afternoon.

Anyway, from tomorrow until Thursday I’ll be swapping sight-seeing trips for talks on a wide range of physics topics. Many of the sessions are devoted to superconductivity, which remains a popular field a quarter of a century after the famous “Woodstock of Physics” March Meeting when the first high-temperature superconductors took centre stage.

Physicists with a keen interest in graphene will face some particularly tough decisions on which talks to attend, with 39 separate sessions devoted to carbon’s newest and sexiest (well, unless you prefer diamonds or buckyballs) allotrope.

There’s also some intriguing-sounding interdisciplinary sessions on the physics of cancer and the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear incident. And finally, I’m hoping to learn more about the latest nifty experiments in my PhD field of atomic and molecular physics.

First, though, I need to go eat some of Boston’s famous seafood…