Tuesday 15 September 2015

From COMEX5 in Krakow

I'm at a conference in Krakow, Poland.  The conference is called COMEX5.  My other half said it sounded like a comic convention.  It's not, but it does indeed share a name with a convention which took place in Singapore a couple of weeks ago.

The COMEX title is an abbreviation of "Collective Motion in Exotic Nuclei."  Despite this being the series's fifth outing, it is really quite a venerable conference series, it being a re-branding of the Giant Resonance conference.  Giant resonances are the main topic of the conference.  They are vibrational states which are very collective in nature, meaning that they feature the action of all nucleons in the nucleus.  Their observation dates back to the mid 1930s when at least the first hint was seen (by Bothe and Gentner in Heidelberg).

I'm giving a talk here on Thursday about using time-dependent methods to describe these resonances, and what is shows about the underlying structure of the nuclei.  I also, of course, take part in the organised events during the conference, such as the reception in Krakow's beautiful Collegium Maius, as pictured.

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