Conference Reports
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CONFERENCE REPORTS
Frontiers in Correlated Matter Scientists Discuss Intellectual Challenges of Complex Adaptive Matter http://icam.ucop.edu One of the great surprises about matter is that as it becomes more complex, it develops new, often unexpected classes of behavior. The rigid crystallinity of a snowflake, the levitation of superconductors, the elasticity of rubber, and the formation and stability of cells in organisms are each examples of properties that emerge from new correlations among the basic building blocks of matter. The understanding of such “correlated” matter, in which knowledge of one microscopic feature (electron, molecule, excitation, or fluctuation) allows prediction of another nearby in space or time, has strong bearing on the development of new materials, but it also continues to shed light on fundamental physics because correlations are of great interest in condensed-matter physics. During August 5–8, 2004, leading physicists studying condensed matter convened for a conference on “Frontiers in Correlated Matter” in Snowmass, Colo. The meeting was sponsored by the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM), an
international consortium of universities and laboratories committed to research into the principles that govern collective behavior—that is, many features acting similarly and cooperatively—in matter. ICAM conceived Frontiers in Correlated Matter as a way of bringing together leading physicists of condensed matter across a broad spectrum of research—ranging from cold “hard” quantum matter to “soft” and biological matter—to address the intellectual challenges of this frontier field and devise ways of projecting its excitement to the general public. Each of the 25 speakers at the summit was invited to lead an interactive discussion about the questions surrounding his or her research, and as a particular challenge, the speakers were asked to describe how they would explain the quest and excitement to a 10-year-old child. Several members of the science outreach community were also invited to participate in the meeting, and in a small outreach workshop that preceded the meeting, there were several lively and optimistic series of
discussions between physicists of condensed matter and members of the museum community, artists, and film-makers interested in telling the story of correlated matter (see sidebar article). Each speaker was charged with the task of presenting 10-minute talks that emphasized the big questions and challenges behind their areas of research and served to seed a 20-minute discussion and debate that followed. This format proved highly stimulating and led to an unusually interactive and frank debate in which participants were surprised by how much new physics they learned across the spectrum of emergent-matter interests. Unlike particle physics and cosmology, condensed-matter physics, with its great diversity and scope, does not easily lend itself to a simple set of grand challenges. Nevertheless, an interesting debate on the big questions, and the best way of coupling t
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