March Meeting Aims Mile High in 2014

 

Venue: Colorado Convention Center
HQ Hotel: Sheraton Downtown
Expected Sessions: >100 Invited
Expected Attendees: >9000
Latest Research From: 23 APS Units

The APS March Meeting is coming to the Mile High City in 2014. It will take place in the Colorado Convention Center in Denver from March 3 through 7. It is the largest yearly physics meeting in the United States and will feature 110 invited sessions, more than 600 contributed sessions and a total of more than 8,000 papers presented. Organizers are expecting almost 10,000 people to attend. The meeting highlights the latest research from the APS Divisions of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics; Biological Physics; Chemical Physics; Computational Physics; Condensed Matter Physics; Fluid Dynamics; Materials Physics; and Polymer Physics, as well as the topical groups on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Magnetism and its Applications, and Quantum Information.

This year's Kavli Foundation Special Session will focus on the history and ongoing efforts to disentangle the "many-electron problem." Taking place on Wednesday afternoon, and titled "The Many-Electron Problem – Where Are We Now?" it will feature speakers Yoshinori Tokura of the University of Tokyo, Laura Greene of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, James Eisenstein of Caltech, Steven Kivelson of Stanford University, and Steven White of the University of California, Irvine.

Before the meeting, the Division of Polymer Physics will hold its popular annual short courses on recent advances in the field of polymer physics. The two-day sessions run from Saturday afternoon to Sunday evening and will focus on simulating polymers using computers.Also on the Sunday before the meeting, eight tutorials on a range of topics will be held. The tutorials are aimed at graduate students, postdocs, university faculty and industrial researchers who want to be brought up to speed on a particular field. There will be four in the morning, followed by a different four in the afternoon. The subjects are Density Functional Theory, Spintronics, Photovoltaics, Graphene, Density Functional Theory and Many Body Perturbation Theory, the Brain Initiative, Topological Materials and MATLAB for Physics Education and Research.

The APS prize and award ceremonial session will be held late on Monday afternoon, honoring the outstanding contributions of researchers to their fields. This will be followed by an opening reception for all participants on Monday evening.

There will be a variety of events for students attending the meeting. On Monday evening, students are invited to attend a special welcome reception and career panel highlighting non-academic and non-PhD career paths. There will also be a Tuesday evening reception where awards will be passed out and where students can meet and mingle. The graduate school fair will be open on Monday and Tuesday for undergraduates looking to learn more about continuing their education. The Job Expo will run from Monday through Thursday. Graduate students can sign up for Lunch with the Experts, where they can enjoy a boxed lunch while having an informal, freewheeling discussion with an expert on their choice of topic.

The Committee on Minorities, in conjunction with the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, will host a Diversity Networking Reception. Open to everyone, the reception will be a chance for physicists who want to learn about APS diversity efforts to meet one another and network.

The Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics will have a special round-table discussion with several physicists working in industry about the unique challenges faced by industrial physicists and how students can pursue careers in industry. 

The exhibit hall will run from March 3 through 5 and will feature more than 130 exhibitors.

The APS Contact Congress booth will be set up for attendees to help them reach their members of Congress to express their concerns about science funding.