Physics Group Hosts Mesoscopic Systems Symposium Oct. 26

Physicists, predominately from New England and Europe, will convene Oct. 26 at Wesleyan to discuss topics related to mesoscopic systems. The one-day event, coordinated by the Physics Department’s Complex Quantum Dynamics and Mesoscopic Phenomena Group, will be the first-ever New England Mesoscopic Systems Symposium.

The mesoscopic scale lies between microscopic and macroscopic, which is visible to the human eye.

“This will be a meeting where scientists from the mesoscopic physics community can meet, exchange ideas, and start and maintain collaborations,” says the symposium coordinator, Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics.

The New England Mesoscopic Systems Symposium will focus on propagation in random media and Anderson Localization, random lasers, interactions, Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum chaos and non-linear dynamics, and quantum dissipation. These are aspects that Kottos and his group have researched in recent years.

The Quantum Dynamics and Mesoscopic Phenomena Group has already invited 26 scholars to speak and present posters from Yale University, Cornell University, Yeshiva University, Princeton University, Harvard University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, Queens College, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Duisburg-Essen and the University of Freiburg, both in Germany, and the Technion and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

Wesleyan presenters include Kottos; Reinhold Blumel, chair of the Physics Department and the Charlotte Agusta Ayres Professor of Physics; and physics graduate students Katrina Smith-Mannschott and Joshua Bodyfelt. Anna Milardo, administrative assistant, helped organized the conference.

The objective of mesoscopic physics is to understand the interplay between wave interferences, disorder and interactions which dictate the complex dynamics on the mesoscopic scale. The outcome of these studies will find immediate applications in building and manipulating nano-devices, such as small quantum boxes (quantum dots) with few electrons and atomic micro-traps. The technological potential of such devices is significant, including, for example, quantum information processing, spintronics, and molecular and atomic circuits.

Kottos hopes the symposium will become an annual event, organized each year by a different institution in the New England area.

“Being the first meeting in a potential series of meetings, we have succeeded to give an international twist, by bringing in speakers from Europe,” Kottos says.

More information about the symposium is online at http://cqdmp.wesleyan.edu/NEMESYS/Home.html.