(no subject)

Physics conferences are humbling in the sense that they really remind you of how much you don't know, and how long of a way one has to go to be a competent scientist. But I've learned a few things today, and even understood some of the talks. Mike Schaffer was kind enough to give me a very patient explanation of his work on magnetic error correction in the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics. I talked to some guys from MIT about a reconnection experiment they're doing, and to a woman from NRL who's using magnetic probes and trying to measure a Hall quadrupole structure, as Matt Landreman did with his forest probe in SSX. This morning a grad student from MRX talked about the reconnection measurements at Princeton and generalizing the Sweet-Parker reconnection model. This was Masaaki Yamada's group at PPPL; they're in some sense our competitors in that they investigate similar physics. I have heard some things about Yamada being extremely tough on his grad stuudents. I also talked to Scott Hsu, whose PhD thesis I'd read. He had done experiments in MRX using the IDSP, or Ion Doppler Spectroscopy Probe, built at Wisconsin. Unlike our IDS system, the IDSP was capable of getting much more local flow/temperature measurements. Chris and I are trying to figure out how to back out useful data from our measurements, where the interpretation is not trivial due to the line averaging. The disadvantage of the IDSP, of course, is that as an unusually large probe one would worry about it being a significant perturbation on the plasma. Our IDS system, which merely looks through the chamber, does not perturb the plasma at all.

There was also a really bad tutorial talk on stellarators this afternoon. The tutorial talks are presumably at a more introductory level and geared towards people unfamiliar with the field. It seemed to be geared towards people who knew tokamak physics but weren't familiar with stellarators. Not knowing tokamaks, I was lost pretty quickly and fell asleep midway through, as did the graduate student sitting next to me.

Went out to dinner with Doc, Chris, and Paul Bellan (for whom Doc had been a postdoc). Sort of an interesting progression at table: Bellan the senior senior scientist, Doc the less experienced but still well-established scientist, Chris, the postdoc and consequent junior scientist, and myself, the undergrad and junior-junior. Things got dull after dinner. I went for a long walk through downtown Denver. I decided to ride a bus, but unlike Poincare, I was not struck by any great ideas as I stepped on.