Friday, March 03, 2006

Overview of MS+S2006: Mesoscopic Superconductivity and Spintronics

I just got back from MS+S2006 (Mesoscopic Superconductivity and Spintronics). Over the next couple of days, I'll digest some of my notes and post my impressions. If you gave a talk and I don't cover your work, it's not because it wasn't impressive; I'll run out of blogging steam at some point.
This conference is held every two years at NTT's Basic Research Laboratory in Atsugi, organized by Dr. Takayanagi, and sponsored by NTT and JST. I went in 2004; it was the first experimental physics conference I attended.
The conference is medium-sized, probably 125 or so total participants; I counted around 100 in some of the sessions.
The program was fantastic; the organizers get a large number of world-class invited speakers, in addition to the submitted talks and posters. We heard Tord Claeson (Chalmers), John Martinis (UC Santa Barbara), Bob Clark (U. New South Wales), Charlie Marcus (Harvard), David Awschalom (UCSB), John Clarke (Berkeley), D. Esteve (Saclay), Prof. Tarucha (U. Tokyo), Per Delsing (Chalmers), Dr. Nitta (NTT), Dr. Semba (NTT), Y. Nakamura (NEC), Hartmut Haeffner (apologies, I'm not sure how to type an umlaut in this system), Andreas Wallraff, and more.
Of course, much of the physics is still beyond me (since I'm a computer systems guy), but there was exciting work presented. Although some of it was basic physics, I'll stick to the quantum computing-related parts of the conference, which were the majority.

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