April Meeting Features Latest Research and More

The 2013 APS April Meeting will take place at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Denver, Colorado from April 13 through 16.

The annual meeting is expected to attract about 1,200 attendees and will feature 72 invited sessions, more than 120 contributed sessions, three plenary sessions, poster sessions and an outreach event.

The meeting highlights the latest research from the APS Divisions of Particles and Fields, Astrophysics, Nuclear Physics, and Beam Physics, as well as the Topical Group on Gravitation and General Relativity. In addition, the Forums on Education, Graduate Student Affairs, History of Physics, International Physics, and Physics and Society will be participating, along with the Topical Groups on Energy Research and Applications, Few-Body Systems, Gravitation, Hadronic Physics, and Precision Measurements & Fundamental Constants.

Plenary sessions throughout the meeting will highlight some of the latest developments in research, as well as some recently revealed history.

The Kavli Foundation Keynote Plenary session is titled “Recent advances in physics at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, neutrino physics, and the study of the cosmic microwave background.” Lloyd Knox from the University of California, Davis will talk about his work using data from NASA’s Planck satellite to glean insights into the standard cosmological model. Florencia Canelli from ETH Zurich will highlight the recent discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Sam Zeller from Fermilab will also focus on high energy physics, highlighting new experiments and developments in determining the value of the neutrino mixing angle, and the search for charge parity violation.

A second plenary session will be about “The quantum in 1913, 2013, and the future.” John Heilbron from University of California, Berkeley will look back on the personal life of Niels Bohr through recently uncovered letters and correspondence before and while formulating his model of the atom. Deborah Jin at the University of Colorado and JILA will discuss her work on ultracold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates. John Preskill of Caltech will highlight the promises and challenges of building a workable quantum computer.

Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute will speak at an evening symposium titled, “Universal Scaling Laws from Cells to Cities; A Physicist’s Search for Quantitative, Unified Theories of Biological and Social Structure and Dynamics.” His talk will focus on how complex biological, sociological and economic systems seem to follow similar, almost universal scaling laws. West’s work indicates that physics can offer new insights into the structure, dynamics and organization of these kinds of systems.

Lisa Randall, Harvard physicist and author of several popular physics books, will give a public talk at a session organized by the American Institute of Physics. She will be speaking about her career and the future of science.

The recipients of many of APS’s prestigious prizes and awards will be honored at a special ceremonial session on Sunday evening.

Students attending the meeting have a variety of events just for them. On Friday, APS will host a career panel focused on non-academic careers students can pursue. Also during the meeting will be a panel where graduate students will share their experiences and answer questions about graduate school.

The Society for Physics Students will be holding a series of special sessions at the meeting for undergraduate research presentations. Students will share their research through posters and lectures. Following the sessions, awards will be given out to the top presenters in each category.

Exhibitors from a range of publishers and other vendors will have booths set up around the hotel to display their products.

Meeting attendees will have the chance to stop by the APS Contact Congress booth to send letters to their elected officials about the importance of continued Congressional support for scientific research.