Marco’s report on APS March 2007 Meeting in IoP Computational Physics Group Newsletter, Autumn 2007.

Marco’s participation was supported by a bursary of £250 from the IoP Computational Physics Group – Research Student Conference Fund.

2007 APS March Meeting

Report by: Marco Pinna, (University of Central Lancashire, Preston), Conference took place in March 2007; Denver, Colorado (US)

The APS March Meeting at Denver was my first international conference with oral and poster presentations about computer simulation of block copolymers. I talked about sphere and gyroid morphologies of diblock copolymers under external fields using Cell Dynamics Simulation.

The conference hall was very huge, and for me it was unbelievable that so many people can present so many works in different fields. The duration of each talk was very short (only ten minutes) plus two minutes for the questions. Sometimes it was really hard to understand the aim or the final results of the work done. Although the time was really short, there was no delay during the oral sessions. Moreover, there was a focus session every day which anyone can attend (for example, my talk was in the session Phase transitions in polymeric systems). What was also very interesting is the poster session where a lot of  different works were presented and where you can ask more questions compared to the oral session presentations. For me it was very useful to see the poster by D. Meng and Q. Wang Symmetric diblock copolymers under Nano-Confinement. The methods used in this work are a lattice Monte Carlo simulation and realspace self-consistent field calculation, which help to understand the formation of the structures and phase transitions of the various morphologies (for example cylinder) in pores of different diameters and different surface preferences. Another interesting poster was about mechanical properties of healthy and tumor tissue by Adriana Dickman. The subject was different from mine, but it was interesting to note that the equations used were similar to the dissipative model where a random force is used.

It is difficult to point a single oral presentation because there were so many very useful talks for continuing my PhD project like one by Venkat Ganesan on Shear induced phase transition in ternary polymer blend. The system used is only polymer blends, however, the method can be used to study also three-block copolymers.

My talk was appreciated by an experimental group that can lead to a future collaboration on better understanding of polymeric systems under different conditions.

Not all talks on the APS March Meeting were only ten minutes long. Invited talks were longer, which made them easier to understand. Moreover, there were special talks during the special session Polymer Physics Prize. The length of these talks were about 30 minutes plus 6 minutes for questions. They were given by G. H. Fredrikson, F. Bates, E. J. Kramer and other very famous people in the field on polymer physics.

This conference was not only organized to present talks and poster but also to present books, software packages and experimental instruments. There was software to make plots or package to look up for references. The most interesting was the book exhibition where anyone can find a book useful for own research field. In my field there were several books in computational and polymer physics. This conference was very useful to understand where the research (for me it is polymer research) is going and what are the possibilities in the future. Such a big conference gives possibility to interact with a lot of different people that work in the same research field and allows for exchange of ideas. This will help to improve the work I am doing in my PhD project.