Yee-Haw! March Meeting Heads Down to Austin, Texas

Next spring some 5000 physicists will head southwest to Austin, Texas, the self- proclaimed American capital of live music, for the 2003 APS March Meeting, to be held March 3-7. Approximately 5000 papers will be presented in more than 90 invited sessions and 550 contributed sessions in a broad range of categories, including condensed matter and materials physics, biological, chemical, computational and high polymer physics; atomic, molecular and optical physics; magnetism and industrial and applied physics.

There will also be numerous nontechnical sessions on physics and society, history of physics, international physics, education, and graduate student affairs.

Once again, the Society will be organizing a host of special events, including receptions, alumni reunions, and a students' lunch with the experts. There will also be a three-day job fair from Monday through Wednesday to facilitate communication between employers and potential employees.

Rounding out the program will be a larger and enhanced exhibit show featuring vendors displaying the latest products, instruments and equipment, and computer software, as well as scientific publications related to physics research and applications.

On the Sunday before the meeting a special workshop on detecting bioterrorism threats will take place. In addition, there will be eight half-day tutorials, and the APS Division of Polymer Physics will be holding its annual two-day short course that weekend, as well. The theme is polymer chemistry for physicists, with a focus on major preparative routes to model polymeric materials, as well as the range of materials accessible by a variety of polymerization techniques.

The preparation of macromolecules with controlled molecular weights, narrow molecular weight distributions, specific comonomer sequences and precise architectures is of critical importance to polymer physics, and the course is intended to be useful to both academic and industrial scientists with an interest in polymer science and engineering.