March Meeting Day 5

Whew! It’s been a while since I have been at the March Meeting for the full week, and I definitely reached information overload.  But before signing off, I wanted to summarize Day 5, Friday!

There were a number of interesting choices in the morning, but I chose to go hear Miles Padgett of the University of Glasgow give a talk on Ghost Imaging with Entangled Photons.  He does really cool things with light, and his job title is officially the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy, which is a title with wonderful history embedded in it.  The talk was about using entangled photons, which are thus correlated in terms of where they came from within a down-conversion crystal, to image an object.  One photon passes through an object of some sort and is just collected in a ‘bucket’, and when there is a photon in that bucket, there must be a correlated photon in the other leg of the optical system. That correlated photon can be collected on a CCD to create an image of the object, even though that photon never interacted with the object.  Very interesting talk, and comprehensible even to me as a total non-expert in the area!

The main item on the agenda for the day was Catherine Tieman’s oral presentation in one of the afternoon sessions.  It’s relatively unusual for one of our students to choose to give an oral presentation because the March Meeting is a pretty high stress situation.  So, we definitely had some tension beforehand, but Catherine did a great job.  It helped that the presenter immediately preceding her was an engaging and very funny speaker, so he warmed up the room a bit.  Catherine even did a very nice job answering questions, which anyone who has done it knows is the hardest part of the March Meeting presentation.

It was a great meeting overall!