Kavli Colloquim Immanuel Bloch

has taken place today. Immanuel Bloch is a (relatively yong) professor in Munich doing very interesting and important experiments on trapping ultra-cold atoms in laser lattices. I must say that usually I feel a certain repulsion to this field/topics due to the reasons I would not discuss now. By no means this applies to Immanuel Bloch. He gave and interesting and brisk talk, very clear even in details, and made an effort to explain the physics involved. This is given the fact that he’s so much to say: he had to subdivide the talk into six "chapters", each being devoted to a distinct experimental situation. He’d no bombastic or excessively ambitious statements, and he did not have to since the quality and quantity of his research spoke for itself.

My task for today was to moderate a mini-symposium with local speakers, a kind of warming-up session for Immanuel Bloch. Katja Nowack, Jos Thijssen and Val Zwiller gave 10+5 minutes presentations. Since nobody at our Institue does ultra-cold atoms, the topics could not be  a perfect match. Howewer, the essence of  ultra-cold atoms is quantum statistics (Katja) many-body physics (Jos) enabled by optical tools (Val) so it all went coherent. 

To complete the pleasure, we’ve also got cake in the break and drinks afterwards.

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