Philadelphia Will Host 2003 APS April Meeting

The "City of Brotherly Love" will host as many as 1500 physicists at the 2003 APS April meeting, to be held April 5-8 in Philadelphia. For the first time, the meeting will coincide with the divisional meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields, and will therefore feature a large complement of invited and contributed sessions devoted to high-energy physics.

In addition, attendees will be drawn from a wide range of other research areas. Besides DPF, APS units represented include the Divisions of Astrophysics, Nuclear Physics, Plasma Physics and Computational Physics; the Forums on Education, Physics and Society, International Affairs, History of Physics and Graduate Student Affairs; and the Topical Groups on Few-Body Systems, Precision Measurement and Fundamental Constants, Gravitation, Plasma Astrophysics, and Hadronic Physics.

The scientific program will feature three plenary sessions and approximately 45 invited sessions - including talks by the most recent recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics-as well as more than 100 contributed and poster sessions. There will also be a special public lecture by Harvard University's Dudley Herschbach on Benjamin Franklin's scientific amusements.

Speakers at the three plenary sessions will cover a broad range of topics, including the mysteries of extra dimensions, antimatter, quantum chaos, and the study of matter, space and time at the energy frontier. There will also be several talks on topics in astrophysics, such as the current status of gamma-ray bursts, solar neutrinos, and observations (by the Chandra Observatory) of supernova remnants and young neutron stars.

The latter two topics will also be addressed on Saturday, April 5, during a special invited session featuring Riccardo Giacconi of Associated Researchers Inc. and Masatoshi Koshiba of the International Center for Elementary Particle Physics in Tokyo, Japan, co-recipients of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Raymond Davis, Jr. of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (See APS News, December 2002).

The two men will discuss the research for which they were honored by the Swedish Academy.