On Thursday and Friday 10-11th January the School of Physics in Bristol hosted the annual Frontiers in Condensed Matter Physics conference, attracting over 130 attendees from the UK and Europe. The two-day meeting was supported by the UK’s two EPSRC funded Centre’s for Doctoral Training in Condensed Matter Physics: the Bath-Bristol CDT-CMP and the Scottish CM-CDT, as well as Oxford Instruments, Cryogenics, Quantum Design, the IOP Low Temperature, Magnetism and Superconductivity Groups. The local organising team consisted of Sven Badoux, Chris Bell, Stephen Clark, Sven Friedemann, Leanne Jeremy, Briony Spraggon as well as Lewis Hart from the University of Bath. Among the many poster presentations the CDT-CMP was strongly represented with contributions by Lauren Cane, Aitor Garcia-Ruiz, Emma Gilroy, Surani Gunasekera, Hannah Robarts, Tom Saunderson, Charles Sayers, Richard Waite and Joe Wilcox. We were even treated to a poem by Aitor when introducing his poster during the first “lightning talk” session – where presenters were given just thirty seconds and one slide to present an overview of their work!
The conference focused on new developments in the fields of superconductivity, magnetism, 2D materials, strong spin-orbit systems and beyond. Invited speakers were Alix McCollam (Nijmegen), Rebeca Ribeiro-Palau (Paris), Clifford Hicks (Dresden) and Dragan Mihailović (Ljubljana). Sir Michael Berry (Bristol) gave a public lecture as part of the conference entitled “Geometric phases and the separation of the world”.
More information can be found on the website: www.frontiers-cmp.org/