Meeting Briefs

Condensation of steel balls on a shaken table. (Jeffrey Olafsen and Jeffrey Urbach, Georgetown University)

Mini-Symposia, Granular Materials Featured at 1998 DFD Fall Meeting

The APS Division of Fluid Dynamics held its 51st annual meeting, 22-24 November in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, jointly hosted by Rutgers University, Princeton University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania. Approximately 900 contributed papers were presented, in addition to several invited lectures. In addition, the 1998 receipients of the APS Fluid Dynamics Prize and Otto LaPorte Award spoke at a special awards program on Sunday afternoon (see APS News, November 1998). The meeting also featured the 16th Annual Gallery of Fluid Motion, an exhibit of contributed photographs and videos of experimental fluid dynamics. Outstanding entries, selected for originality and their ability to convey and exchange information, will appear in the September 1999 issue of Physics of Fluids.

The meeting featured three mini-symposia in addition to the usual invited and contributed sessions. The first featured talks on new research into gas fluidized beds. The second offered faculty perspectives on graduate student contributions, opportunities and changes in fluid dynamics research, while the third focused on convection in nematic liquid crystals. Other sessions of interest included lectures on the application of fluid mechanics to the study of blood flow and the vascular system, fiber flocculation in papermaking, and complex fluids and materials processing, as well as new evolution equations for turbulent boundary layers and vortex dynamics of accelrtated inhomogenous flows.

Another highlight of the meeting was the presentation of new experimental research on clustering and collapse in granular materials such as salt, sand, sugar, and seeds, which share some properties with solids, liquids, and ideal gases, but also have peculiar properties of their own. For example,the thermal energy of a grain is a trillion times less than the energy it takes to lift one grain on top of another. Besides wanting to apply knowledge about granular materials in such industrial settings as foodstuffs, paint mixing, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, researchers hope to find more relations among the many things in the universe that clump and condense, such as atoms, bacteria, and galaxies.

Annual GEC Incorporated into DAMOP
The annual Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC), an endorsed conference of the APS for over a decade, has been officially incorporated into the APS meetings structure as a divisional meeting of the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP). According to Gordon Dunn, DAMOP divisional councilor, of the approximately 300 to 500 people that attend GEC each year, about half are APS members.

DPF Holds 1999 Winter Meeting
The APS Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) held its annual meeting January 6-9, 1999, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Featured topics of the invited plenary sessions held on Friday and Saturday included electroweak physics, B factories, high energy astrophysics, heavy flavor physics, rare decays and CP violation, neutrino physics, particle physics and the early universe, and perspectives on future accelerators. The program also featured a town meeting with Martha Krebs, director of the Department of Energy on Thursday evening, and a Wednesday evening session co-sponsored by the DPF and the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, on the problems faced by dual-career couples when seeking scientific employment (see story here).