Friday 29 January 2016

Meetings in 2016

This seems to be the time of year when various announcements for meetings get sent round, with the usual selection of conferences and workshops, with extended deadlines to ensure that they get as many attendees as they would like.  As much for my own benefit as anything else, here's a selection of them, and some comments:

• 30/03–01/04: IoP Annual Nuclear Physics Conference 2016: This is, as the name reveals, a conference that takes place every year around Easter time.  Its organisation cycles round the nuclear physics groups in the UK and this year it's Liverpool's turn.   It's a national conference aimed at attracting most of the UK community along, though it's open to all, and some of the invited speakers are usually from overseas.  It's a place where UK PhD students get to cut their teeth with a talk.  I like going to it, and usually do go.  Haven't quite made up my mind about attending this year.  Around Easter I have to also fit in visits to our MPhys students on placement.   Abstract Deadline 23/02.

• 19/06–24/06: Nuclei in the Cosmos XIV: The fourteenth in the series of a conference dedicated to the role of nuclear physics in astrophysics and cosmology.  The remit is pretty wide -- covering things like dark matter and dark energy (presumably because of putative detection methods), to nucleosynthesis, neutron stars, and even the rather general "radioactive nuclei far from stability" (presumably because of relevance to the r-process).  I've never been to one of these conferences, and my research is not directly related to astrophysics (though it has implications in it).   The conference is in Niigata, where I have never been, but I don't intend to submit an abstract.  I received an email today telling me that the abstract deadline has been extended to 10/02.

• 11/07–15/07: DREB2016: The acronym stands for Direct Reactions with Exotic Beams -- so a rather specific topic.  Exotic beams means that the beam nucleus which is being fired at some target is radioactive, which typically (always?) means that it has been created as a product in some reaction in an accelerator facility and then is immediately taken to be used as the beam for a further reaction.  A direct reaction is one in which a fast single-step reaction takes places, such as a single nucleon (proton or neutron) gets knocked out or transferred between the colliding nuclei (as opposed to, say, fusion).  I don't really think of myself as part of the DREB community, but the theoretical technique I use is used to study the dynamics of transfer reactions.  Just not by me -- at least not very much.  Surrey once hosted a conference in the DREB series, in 2003, and I went along to a little bit of that, as I recall.  This one is in Halifax, Novo Scotia.  I'd quite like to go there, but I don't think it's terribly reasonable of me to try to spin any of my recent work as being really on-topic (not that that seems to inhibit many people at conferences).  They have also extended their abstract deadline, which now stands at 14/02.

• 24/07–29/07: Nuclear Structure 2016:  The first announcement for this arrived in my e-mail earlier this week.  "Nuclear Structure" means the structures and properties of nuclei -- sometimes used as opposed to nuclear reactions (being how nuclei interact with each other).  The structural properties of nuclei affect almost everything else, such as how they react, and one can imagine a wide range of talks, though they will presumably be concentrated on straightforward determination and understanding of structure of nuclei, with new results from the latest experiments pushing towards never-before-seen isotopes, and the latest theoretical developments.  It's in Knoxville, Tennessee.  I used to live there, so if I go (I might) then it would not be as an excuse to see a new part of the world. Nuclear Structure 1998 (also in Tennessee) was one of the first conferences I ever attended, when I was a PhD student, and living over there.  Abstract Deadline 01/04.

• 11/09–16/09: INPC2016:  This is a big conference, at least by nuclear physics standards.  Unusually for nuclear physics, these International Nuclear Physics Conferences are so big they take place in convention centres, with the capacity to have multiple parallel sessions.  I think it is still a smaller conference than in some other areas of physics, like the SPIE Photonics West conference that I accompanied my wife on when she was speaking at one.  I sometimes hear my colleagues describe INPC as "too big".  I went to my first INPC at its last outing, in Florence.  I used the fact that it was large, and with a correspondingly large scope, to attend sessions far from my area of expertise and so to learn some new things.  I enjoyed it, and am thinking seriously of submitting an abstract to attend this year, too.  It's in Adelaide.  I've never been to Australia, but I have to make a visit around this time of year to visit one of our students on placement, so it seems sensible to visit for a week instead of a day.  I'm not sure if they've announced an abstract deadline, but the first circular promises a second circular in February, which will no doubt give more details.  The picture with this post is of the Adelaide Convention Centre.

Sorry if I've omitted your conference or workshop.  I know there are others.  The NuPECC list is the most comprehensive one I am aware of.

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