Meeting Briefs

APS Four Corners Section
The APS Four Corners Section held its fall meeting September 29-30 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. A special session on Physics in Colorado on Friday afternoon, as well as a Saturday invited session that featured physics demonstrations by Brian Jones, creator of the "Little Shop of Physics", were open to the public and the press, in keeping with the general physics emphasis of the section's fall meeting. The session on local physics featured lectures on probing a quantum degenerate gas of fermionic atoms, the BABAR experiment in high energy physics, and NMR and MRI. Friday evening's banquet was followed by a public lecture by Roger Culver on celestial events that changed history. Other topics covered during Saturday's sessions included high pressure physics at Brigham Young University; dynamical localization in nonlinear lattices; extreme nonlinear optics; STM measurements of surface diffusion; and developing extracurricular programs for K-12 grads to interface scientists with schools.

APS Ohio Section
The APS Ohio Section held its annual fall meeting October 13-14 at the University of Toledo in Ohio, organized around the theme of photovoltaics and the environment. The meeting was held in conjunction with the corresponding geographical section of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Friday evening's after-dinner speaker was John P. Thornton of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, who gave a lecture entitled, "Disaster! What Will You Do When the Electricity Disappears." Other invited speakers during the weekend's sessions covered such topics as high-throughput manufacturing of thin-film PV modules; amorphous silicon photovoltaic technology; photovoltaic arrays for NASA missions; and the potential commercialization of high-efficiency concentrator solar cells.

APS New York Section
The APS New York State Section held its annual fall meeting October 20-21 at the State University of New York, Buffalo's Amherst campus. The program consisted of three one-half day sessions devoted to three separate topics: cosmology, strings and particle physics, all intended for the non-specialist. In addition to the invited lectures, each session featured a special tutorial. Friday evening's banquet speaker was Fermilab's Rocky Kolb. Cosmology topics included the case for dark matter, the cosmological constant and the inflationary universe, and the evolution of the universe. The session on strings covered such topics as the physics of extra large dimensions, gravity in infinite volume extra dimensions, and strings and black holes. Particle physics topics included mass and mixing in the neutrino sector, quark-gluon plasmas, and CP-violation in rare kaon decay.

APS Texas Section
The APS Texas Section held its annual fall meeting October 27-29 at Rice University in Houston, Texas, in conjunction with the corresponding units of the AAPT and the Society of Physics Students, as well as the National Society of Hispanic Physicists. Friday evening's banquet featured a lecture by Dava Sobel, author of the best-selling books Longitude and Galileo's Daughter. The meeting program also featured several workshops for physics teachers, as well as opportunities to tour local physics research facilities.