Pictures and Slides from COMEX6

The organisers of the COMEX6 conference which I attended earlier this year have just sent me an email with a link to the slides of presentations, and the photo gallery from the official conference photographer. 

I pass on a direct link to my slides if you should want them, and I post the nicest picture of me (on the right, with my colleague Bastian Schuetrumpf from GSI on the left)

COMEX6: Day 1

We've had a first, and rather full, day at the COMEX6 conference.  From the hotel at 7:45 to get a bus to iThemba Labs, who are organising the conference (though for the rest of the week we will use the hotel conference room, so no busing back and forth).  The labs are about a 30m ride from downtown Cape Town, and are a fairly typical nuclear physics facility with their big buildings housing accelerators, and their own unique set of animals wandering around outside (different from GANIL's many rabbits) .  The conference room is great, with probably the most comfortable lecture room seats I have come across.  Well done iThemba Labs.

As at most conference, they handed out a pad of paper on which we delegates can make notes.  No doubt we don't all use it:  some will not make notes, some will do it on computer or in their own notebooks.  I did make notes, filling up about half the 50-page A5 notebook, as well as start a list of calculations I can make that relate to the talks (that's taken up one of the pages, so far).  So plenty of interesting ideas out there in the conference for me.  I've started some of the calculations going, to try to understand the question posed in the title of one of the talks; "Are the molybdenums fluffy too?"  If course, the answer given in the talk follows the rule that the answer to questions posed in the title of science talks is "no".

The day ended with a tour of the lab, during which I took the pictures posted here.  Then we had the poster session and a dinner, which was mostly a braai (a kind of barbecue) except for us vegetarians, who got vegetable curry.  Yummy.

COMEX6

 I'm in Cape Town for COMEX6: COllective Motion in nuclei under EXtreme conditions.  I've not been to sub-saharan Africa before, and this is about as sub as it gets, I guess.  I have been a sporadic attender of the COMEX conference because part of my work involves studying giant resonances -- excited states of nuclei which are collective, meaning many or all the protons and neutrons in the nucleus are acting together in the excitation.  In particular, my most recent PhD student and I looked at the magnetic spin-dipole excitation, and how often-neglected terms in the nuclear interaction have a strong effect on the structure of these excitations.  We put a paper up on the arXiv about it (https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07823) last year.  Now, here in Cape Town while immersed in the topic, may be the time I do one final supplementary calculation on the results in that paper to get it finally published in a journal.