Last week I was back in Hsinchu for the three-day Annual Meeting of the Taiwan Physical Society.

This conference was very local: only about 10% of the participants were from abroad (I’m uncertain if that figure includes people like me). They were nonetheless able to get some pretty good invited speakers including my PhD supervisor, Anders Sandvik, and Nobel Laureate and former US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. I was honored to shake Secretary Chu’s hand at the banquet (unfortunately, there is no selfie).

I gave a talk based on thermodynamics of deconfined spinons in a magnetic field, the same topic as my poster from the ICAM-NCTS.

I had great conversations with Taiwanese physicists, including some new potential collaborators. I was also able to catch up with my PhD supervisor, Anders Sandvik to discuss some aspects of the modifications I am making to my QMC code in order to measure off-diagonal imaginary-time correlations.

As a bonus, while walking from my hotel to the conference I stumbled upon the NTHU Research Reactor. I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a nuclear reactor, but I never managed to get a tour of the MIT research reactor (despite living only blocks away from it in Cambridge, MA). Hopefully I can get a tour of this one.