Monday 14 July 2014

Nuclear Matters



So, after last week's NuSYM14 conference, it's back to to getting on with summer tasks in the office. I've spent the morning so far reading through a chapter of my students draft PhD thesis and giving comments, and I'm shortly going to meet a visitor of another mystery academic, who phoned me up to ask if I could help them with time-dependent density functional theory.  I don't know if I can, but I'll find out soon.  

The picture from the NuSYM conference was sent by the organisers to everyone that took part, and since it is going up on the conference web page anyway, I thought I'd reproduce it here, too.  If you want to see all the slides from all the talks, you can find them, too, on the conference web page.  In the picture, I'm in the panama hat, which unfortunately shades my face (although that's rather the point of it).

Speaking of nuclear matter, I've recently learnt of a conference going on in Kent this summer which includes at least one talk on nuclear matter -- specifically on its compressibility.  This conference is all about a model, known as Skyrmions, which are a field-theoretic approach to nuclei.  Typically, they are treated more as mathematical curiosities, or perhaps fairer to say are more studied by mathematical physicists and there's not much dialogue between them and people who style themselves nuclear physicists.  Too bad, really.  I don't think I'll make it to the Kent conference, but I never knew their model had got so far as to be applied to describing compressibility of nuclear matter, so will at least check out their work on it.


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