Last week I attended the NCTS-ICAM Annual Meeting and Workshop at National Tsing-Hua University (清華大學) in Hsinchu (新竹), Taiwan. It was a delightful week of presentations and discussions with condensed matter physicists from all over the world and an excellent opportunity to build my professional network here in Taiwan. 

I presented my poster “Direct numerical observation of Bose-Einstein condensation of deconfined spinons” in which I use a magnetic field to induce a finite density of magnetic excitations at a deconfined quantum critical point and use thermodynamics to show that they must be deconfined spinons (an extension of Ch. 4 of my dissertation). I received some excellent feedback on my poster that will help improve my manuscript. 

There were fascinating talks including David Campbell, Duncan Haldane, Nic Shannon and Suchitra Sebastian. ICAM also made the wise decision to include a panel discussion on women in physics as part of the main schedule (rather than in a parallel session or as an extra event). It was a great opportunity to hear from women physicists about the challenges they face and to get some updated data from Laura Greene (former president of APS). 

Part of the conference was an excursion to 南圓 (Nanyuan), a beautiful resort in the foggy mountains near Hsinchu. We had a tour of the beautiful Chinese garden and partook in a tea ceremony.