Wednesday - Day 3
In comparison to the first two days of the conference Wednesday was a lot less exciting or busy. I had nothing to worry about and no real must see sessions to focus on so I went with the flow a bit. The first session I went to was on 'Ultrafast and Attosecond Physics', a pretty impressive title. So what motivated my choice? Well, firstly it sounded exciting and it had two talks on spectroscopy going on, so it sounded like the best option for me. There were some good presentations, but I don't really remember them very much to be honest, as there wasn't a whole lot to take in but, that's life. Sometimes you get lucky, other times you don't. After lunch (still not great) I went to the plenary on translating your research into a product. That was definitely worth going to, with the current head of the institute of physics talking about her opinions on how research should become a technology. Interestingly she said quite strongly that the trend for spinning out companies from universities to sell the research, with academics heading up the new company, is not a good idea. I found that very interesting as Leeds and Sheffield seem into creating new companies to make money. The proposed alternative was that you should licence your work to an existing company and not be greedy about the money. It's curious, because if spin outs didn't work universities wouldn't keep creating them. Anyway, I have some food for thought now. Unfortunately, I didn't have a similar experience from the second plenary. The speaker was talking about the integration of light with metal, so at first I was fine, until he talked faster and faster and jumped around a lot. I think the most frustrating thing about the whole experience was that before he started the speaker said this was going to be an introductory talk! Ha! It definitely didn't feel like one to me.
So with the whistle stop tour of business and "introductory" physics over I had 2 more sessions to attend. I went with 'trapping and manipulation', which looked at ways of trapping and cooling molecules or atoms using lasers. I then went for optical and quantum metrology for the final session as it's related to what a lot of people in my lab do. Again the theme for the afternoon was interesting but not relevant, not helped by the fact I felt like I was reaching conference saturation point by this part of the day!
Wednesday did not end with the talks though, we had the conference dinner to go to. The dinner tried so hard to be gourmet. It really did, but it just couldn't match it's own aspirations. I mean on bake-off night they made the error of calling a chocolate roulade a terrine! Mary Berry would not be pleased with that! Culinary confusion aside, I had a really nice time and there were lots of free drinks, so they got that right. I also managed not to let the networking opportunity slide during the dinner. I chatted to someone from Leeds I didn't know and one of my supervisor's collaborators I hadn't met before (Yey networking). The cherry on the top was when one of my lab mates won a prize for his poster. With the meal done we headed home via an impromptu networking session with some other attendees (aka a pub trip).
Thursday - Day 4
Day 4 finally! Time to go home! Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed photon, but I really wanted to be back home. However, I did have a good time in the last two sessions before home. I managed to find a talk on monitoring biology through some really complicated laser work. It was certainly interesting, but I'm not sure if it will catch on because of its complexity, but there were some really nice ideas about trying to observe the light given out by a protein when it was doing different things. Hopefully there might be a way to make the process easier so that we can exploit it in the future. The final session I attended was on fibre optic sensors. It was a session that probably won't help my project, but it was really interesting. It turns out that you can use fibre optic cables with special elements in to act as sensors for temperature, humidity, force and more! And, people are working on incorporating them into metals and concrete to give in depth analysis about what's going on inside structures. How cool is that! One of the talks even covered a way to set concrete using microwaves! Sometimes you forget that there is some really fun science in the world and I'm so glad my last session of the conference left me thinking, and with a smile on my face.
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