Because of the timing of my flight back to Houston, I really only went to one session today, in which my student spoke as did some collaborators. It was a pretty interesting collection of contributed talks.
- The work that's been done on spin transport in multiferroic insulators is particularly interesting to me. A relevant preprint is this one, in which electric fields are used to reorient \(\mathbf{P}\) in BiFeO3, which correspondingly switches the magnetization in this system (which is described by a complicated spin cycloid order) and therefore modulates the transmission of spin currents (as seen in ferromagnetic resonance).
- Similarly adding a bit of La to BiFeO3 to favor single ferroelectric domain formation was a neat complement to this.
- There were also multiple talks showing the utility of the spin Hall magnetoresistance as a way to characterize spin transport between magnetic insulators and strong spin-orbit coupled metals.
Some wrap-up thoughts:
- This meeting venue and environment was superior in essentially every way relative to last year's mess in Las Vegas. Nice facilities, broadly good rooms, room sizes, projectors, and climate control. Lots of hotels. Lots of restaurants that are not absurdly expensive. I'd be very happy to have the meeting in Minneapolis again at some point. There was even a puppy-visiting booth at the exhibit hall on Tuesday and Thursday.
- Speaking of the exhibit hall, I think this is the first time I've been at a meeting where a vendor was actually running a dilution refrigerator on the premises.
- Only one room that I was in had what I would describe as a bad projector (poor color balance, loud fan, not really able to be focused crisply). I also did not see any session chair this year blow it by allowing speakers to blow past their allotted times.
- We really lucked out on the weather.
- Does anyone know what happens if someone ignores the "Warning: Do Not Drive Over Plate" label on the 30 cm by 40 cm yellow floor plate in the main lobby? Like, does it trigger a self-destruct mechanism, or the apocalypse or something?
- Next year's combined March/April meeting in Anaheim should be interesting - hopefully the venue is up to the task, and likewise I hope there are good, close housing and food options.
3 comments:
As long as Disneyland doesn’t control things, Anaheim should have good and affordable options.
I enjoyed the warm weather too, but maybe "lucked out" isn't the right way to put it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/climate/winter-february-heat-wave.html
"Cities in the Midwestern United States jumped out for experiencing an extraordinarily warm winter and for the influence of climate change, which is caused mainly by the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. “Really off the charts,” Dr. Pershing said. “No ice on most of the great lakes. That’s remarkable.”
Minneapolis, for instance, was nearly 5.6 degrees Celsius warmer than average between December and February. The fingerprints of climate change could be detected for 33 days, essentially a third of the winter season."
I think it was one of the best March Meeting convention centers I've been to. I remember San Antonio was also really nice.
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