Physics of particles, stars, black holes, gravity, nuclear waste policy and more

In his Francis M. Pipkin Award Talk, Zheng-Tian Lu of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago will describe how he and his colleagues have recently succeeded in using lasers to trap and cool helium-8 atoms. This has allowed them to study this exotic form of matter, revealing basic information about the fundamental forces within atomic nuclei. (Talk B3.2, http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR09/Event/101646).

12) PUBLIC LECTURE: DEATH FROM THE SKIES WITH THE BAD ASTRONOMER

The April Meeting public lecture will feature the popular pseudoscience debunker Phil "The Bad Astronomer" Plait. Plait will take a look at some of the most fearsome death-from-the-skies calamities, the science principles behind them, and the odds that any of them will disrupt our quiet corner of the cosmos. The lecture is open to the public and April meeting attendees. (May 4, 7:00 p.m., Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel. http://www.aps.org/meetings/april/events/spec-sessions/plait.cfm).

13) PLENARY SESSIONS

Three plenary sessions are devoted to premier topics which should be of interest to all attendees at the meeting. Session A1 (8:30 a.m. on Saturday) features talks on the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope, described above; the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab, where the insides of protons and neutrons are probed by beams of electrons; and the merger of two black holes, an event which is expected to produce bursts of gravity waves observable by detectors on or near Earth. (Session A1, http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR09/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=104480).

Session P1 (8:30 a.m. on Monday) features talks about the coming generation of X-ray free electron lasers, facilities such as those under construction at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California and DESY in Germany, where coherent light will afford imaging with 1-angstrom spatial resolution and time resolutions at the femto- or even atto-second level; a look at nuclear physics by Robert Rosner, outgoing director of Argonne National Laboratory; and an assessment of the likely terrorist threats involving nuclear and non-nuclear explosives by University of California, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, author of the popular book, "Physics for Future Presidents." (Session P1, http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR09/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=104481).

The third plenary session, V1 (8:30 a.m. on Tuesday), features three talks about huge international facilities: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which looks at particle collisions at the highest energy accelerator in the world; the Pierre Auger Observatory, the largest detector of cosmic rays; and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which will be the largest tokamak device for undertaking nuclear fusion reactions. (Session V1, http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR09/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=104482).