News from the Chair

2020 Four Corners (Virtual) Sectional Meeting of the APS

By David Dunlap

The 2020 Four Corners Sectional (Virtual) Meeting of the American Physical Society concluded late Saturday afternoon with an awards ceremony at which two P&A graduate students, Andrew Forbes and Anupam Mitra, won awards in the outstanding student talks category.

Andrew Forbes' presentation was entitled, Study of the rare decays of \(B^0_s\) and \(B^0\) mesons into muon pairs using data collected during 2015 and 2016 with the ATLAS detector.

Anupam Mitra's presentation was entitled, How tractable is the simulation of open quantum system dynamics of Ising models?

Our congratulations to both!

This was the 23rd annual conference of the 4 corners section, and the third hosted by UNM since its 1998 inaugural conference in Regener Hall which attracted 80 participants. 

According to the conference organizers John Harton (CSU) and David Dunlap, this year there were 266 participants and 177 presentations which were distributed among 142 sessions. 

The Bring-Your-Own Banquet talk was from Paul Davies from the ASU Beyond Center, speaking live from Australia.

There were 7 plenary talks, including the conference opening by Ivan Deutsch entitled Breaking Heisenberg: Controling the Quantum World, and a talk by LANL scientist Elizabeth Merritt (UNM PhD 2013) on High-Energy Density Hydrodynamics for Astrophysics and Fusion.

There were 15 parallel-session invited talks including Elizabeth Crosson, speaking on The sign problem and its relation to the spectral gap in quantum many-body problems, and Kathrin Spendier, University of Colorado CS (UNM PhD 2012) speaking on Developing a Drug Delivery System Using Magnetic Particles – Tools and Strategies.

The talk voted best-of-conference is recognized each year with the bestowing of the Spherical Cow Award. Ivan Deutsch was this year’s winner. Congratulations Ivan!

The conference was made possible with generous donations from the 4 Corners Section, and the APS. Congratulations to all!

See the UNM Newsroom article