1997 March Meeting: Large & Small, Old & New

The 1997 APS March Meeting will be held March 17-21 1997, in Kansas City, Missouri. This year will see the addition of two new topical groups to what is presumably the world's largest physics meeting. The Topical Group on Magnetism and its Applications and the Topical Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics were established at the May 1996 meeting of the APS Council, and will join the usual suspects in arranging symposia and contributed paper sessions.

In contrast to the small and newly formed units, the Division of Condensed Matter Physics, which represents the largest portion of the meeting's presentations, will be 50 years old in 1997. Originally established as the Division of Solid State Physics in 1947 (its name was changed in 1978), it has the largest membership of any unit of the APS.

The addition of the two new topical groups to the lineup at the March Meeting augments the steady growth of the meeting since the "Woodstock of Physics" in New York 10 years ago, which featured the presentation of spectacular new results in the area of high-temperature superconductivity. This can also be seen, for example, in the fact that the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics (also very well-represented at the March Meeting) is the second largest APS unit, even though it was founded only two years ago. Furthermore, growth in the membership of the Materials Physics Topical Group, established in 1984, led to its becoming a become a Division in 1990.

These contrasts of newly emerging areas of study with more established areas of research, of large groups and small groups of colleagues, of industry and academia, of students and researchers, combine to make the gargantuan March Meeting a major attraction to physicists and one of the most exciting events of the APS year.

A tentative list of invited speakers is available on the APS home page in the March Meeting announcement. This year there will be almost 100 invited symposia and over 550 invited speakers. Last year, contributed submissions totaled 4,350 papers and the Society anticipates an even higher number this year.

Once again, in an effort to cut down on the number of parallel session created by the meeting's increasing popularity, DCMP poster sessions will be highlighted on Monday and Tuesday evening. Submitting for poster presentation guarantees a speaker's presentation will be on one of the first two days of the meeting. Please see the announcement in APS Meeting News for further information.

Due to the success of the electronic abstract submission process, the complete program will be available to the membership much earlier than it was in the paper universe. Look for the 1997 March Meeting program to be posted on the APS home page by 15 January 1997, fully two months before the meeting. This will enable attendees to create their own schedule in advance and take advantage of reduced airfare by booking their flights earlier.

Tutorials will be given on Sunday, prior to the first day of the meeting, at the Kansas City Convention Center. These half-day short courses are designed to give the attendees practical applications of a diverse set of tools, technology and theory. The cost is $75 per course, and $25 for students. (See article in November 1996 APS Meeting News.)