APS March Meeting 2026, Day 1

I hit a pretty random assortment of talks on my first day at the APS Global Physics Summit, after catching a very early flight to get to Denver.  Here are a few highlights:

• My colleague Hanyu Zhu gave a nice talk about the coupling between chiral phonons (vibrational excitations of atomic motion that carry net orbital angular momentum) and their coupling to electronic spins.  For example, chiral ionic motion can effectively generate enormous local magnetic fields (see here).
• I went to part of a session about magnons (quantized spin waves) and their connection to quantum information.  There was a theory talk by Silvia Viola Kusminskiy about cavity manipulation of magnons, and there was an experimental talk by Mathias Weiler about using surface acoustic waves plus magnetoelastic coupling to set up all sorts of interesting nonreciprocal magnetoacoustic devices. 
• My former postdoc Longji Cui gave a talk about molecular phononics - measuring thermal transport (by phonons) down to the single molecule level.  For a nice review of the overall topic, see here.  He then discussed extending this to measurements of polymers.
• There was a session about strange metals and the cuprates, which included a talk by Dragana Popovic about how there is evidence for persistent vortex-liquid-like phase fluctuations in these materials even into the normal state.  This was followed by Nigel Hussey showing systematic studies of the magnetoresistance in both electron-doped and hole-doped cuprates.  The upshot is that in the electron-doped materials, there is a clear anisotropic inelastic scattering rate (from spin fluctuations) that scales with the superconducting transition, implying that spin fluctuations are the "glue".  In contrast, the hole-doped system has different systematics, implying that perhaps the strange metal fraction of material is what leads to superconductivity.
• For maybe the second time in my long attendance at the meeting, I attended the APS prize session, where they present the certificates associated with the various honors.  It was very nice.

Now I just need to get some sleep and figure out what to see tomorrow....