Workshop on structural and electronic instabilities in oxide nanostructures

I've spent the last two days at a fun "Physics at the Falls" workshop at the University of Buffalo.  It's been cool learning about the impressive variety of physics at work in these systems.  A few takeaways:

• With enough stainless steel and high tech equipment you can grow (and in situ characterize with everything from electron diffraction to photoemission, angle-resolved and otherwise) just about anything these days!
• There's a lot of pretty work getting done growing epitaxial complex oxides down to the single unit cell level, and a lot of accompanying extremely high resolution transmission electron microscopy.
• Untangling thermal effects from optical effects in nonequilibrium experiments can be tricky.  Interesting to see that lower energy photons can be more efficient at kicking systems from one phase to another than photons much more energetic than any energy gap.
• There does seem to be some convergence on understanding LAO/STO oxide heterojunctions.
• We still don't understand superconductivity in strontium titanate, even though it's been known for decades.
• Orbitals really matter, when you are dealing with relatively localized electrons.
• Niagara Falls is very impressive!