EGAS47, what have you missed

By Isabelle Auffret-Babak on July 29, 2015

Besides an interesting cultural visit at Rundale Palace, a great dinner at Bibliotēka №1Restorāns in the heart of Riga and the kick-off of the Baltic Festival with Latvian folk music and dancers, (just on time for the meeting, coincidence??), EGAS47 had a lot to offer on the scientific level.

Circa 180 delegates originating from more than 20 countries were attending the meeting this year, as it was the second of its kind taking place in Riga. We had the privilege to hear Professor Sir Michael Berry (Bristol University), on the Editorial Board of JPhysA, give the first plenary lecture on Singularities of light. For those of you who could not be there, you might be able to catch-up Professor Sir Michael Berry as he is touring the world to give this lecture as part of the International Year of Light celebrations – I certainly recommend it.

The rest of the meeting was really run like clockwork. Owing to the configuration of the conference, I could attend most of the talks and here I take my hat off to the conference organizers for lining up an excellent programme from both a variety of topics and quality of the speakers’ point of views.

As far as the journal was concerned, I was impressed by the talk by Marianna Safronova (University of Delaware) on the “Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules” that was tying in nicely with that of Michael G. Kozlov’s (Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute and St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University “LETI”), on “Using atoms and molecules to search for variation of fundamental constants”. I thank here Professor Kozlov for speaking to me in great details about his research. I hope that more of this work gets published in JPhysB in the near future, but in the mean time, direct this community to our spectroscopy of highly charged ions special issue that is still free-to-read until 1 September 2015.

EGAS47, University of Latvia, July 2015

Let me conclude this short post, by mentioning that EGAS48 will take place, together with ECAMP12 next year, in Frankfurt. You can find all information at: http://www.ecamp.uni-frankfurt.de/.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License