APS April Meeting Preview

This year’s APS April Meeting will head to Denver, Colorado, where attendees can share in a range of symposia, scientific presentations, and workshops. In keeping with the conference theme of “Quarks to the Cosmos,” the topics will touch on the smallest constituents of matter and the largest structures in the universe. More than 1,000 conference-goers will converge on the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel for four days of physics organized by 22 APS membership units and committees.

Three distinguished scientists will speak about neutrino physics at the Kavli Foundation Keynote Plenary Session on Monday, April 15 (8:30 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.). André de Gouvêa (Northwestern University) will discuss neutrino mass and physics beyond the Standard Model. Susanne Mertens (TUM/MPI-Munich) will cover different direct and indirect approaches to measurement of the neutrino mass. Marcos Santander (University of Alabama) will present recent results from the IceCube experiment, a cubic-kilometer detector at the South Pole.

Several events will kick things off as a prelude to the technical sessions. The APS Topical Group on Hadronic Physics (GHP) is hosting their 8th workshop, also at the Sheraton, from April 10 through 12. The APS Topical Group on Precision Measurements and Fundamental Constants is holding a pre-meeting workshop on “New Ideas in Dark Matter Searches” on Friday, April 12 (8:50 a.m. - 5:15 p.m.). Also on Friday (4–5 p.m.), APS holds its Annual Business Meeting with presentations from APS leadership and a chance to ask questions in-person and online.

On Saturday, April 13, members of the Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics (PICUP) will hold a workshop (6:30 - 9:30 p.m.) on the importance of integrating computation into the physics curriculum and guide participants in discussing and planning how they would integrate computation into their courses (for more, see the Back Page in this issue).

Saturday evening, Katherine Freese (University of Michigan) will give a public lecture on “Dark Matter in the Universe,” explaining for a general audience the evidence for this invisible component of the cosmos and the continuing investigation into its nature (7:00 - 8:00 p.m.).

A special Town Hall session on the APS Strategic Plan: 2019 will feature discussions of the planning process, the plan content, and implementation goals for the coming years. See the meeting website for date, time, and location.

For more information, see the APS April Meeting website.