APS March Meeting, in the City of Roses
I spent last week in Portland for the APS March meeting. It was one of my favorite APS meetings so far. First, the city has some free public transportation, is walkable, and very fun. I got to see many old friends. And I ended up giving two talks.
The first talk was on our PRL paper Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory for Open Quantum Systems with Unitary Propagation.
The session was very interesting, with many proposals for how to expand the realm of applicability of TD-DFT. My boss was supposed to give this talk, but ended up canceling his trip at the last minute.
The second talk was on our paper Linear assignment maps for correlated system-environment states.
This talk was part of the OQS and Decoherence session. For some reason, this session is always on Friday afternoon, which is always the least attended day at the APS, as many leave the conference early. Can this be changed? Still, I got all the usual questions about negative maps, so people were somewhat interested.
How are the sessions organized? How are the days chosen, how are the talks in the session organized? I don’t know. Hopefully, next year, my talk will be at a reasonable day and time.
—
At dawn of day, when you dislike being called, have this thought ready: “I am called to man’s labour; why then do I make a difficulty if I am going out to do what I was born to do and what I was brought into the world for? Is it for this that I am fashioned, to lie in bedclothes and keep myself warm?” “But this is more pleasant.” “Were you born then to please yourself; in fact for feeling, not for action? Can’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees each doing his own work, helping for their part to adjust a world? And then you refuse to do a man’s office and don’t make haste to do what is according to your own nature.” “But a man needs rest as well.”
-Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, on how hard it is for a roman emperor to get up in the morning
