Although we left the poster session only 1 hour after it was supposed to end, there was still time for a short hiking trip around the beautiful #LakeEstes in #EstesPark !
Lead by a fearless Canadian, we also travelled through the "aggressive elk" zone, but fortunately only saw a not very aggressive elk with her little offspring (only mother elk is in the photo) 🥰
#ICOLS2023

Day 2 of #ICOLS2023 !
The topics of the talks today ranged from X-ray #spectroscopy to different applications and ideas around #UltracoldMolecules - including some deep dives into chemistry!
The talk program finished with our professor's introduction to #AtomInterferometry and an overview of what you can do with it - on earth and in space (basically everything!).
Then we had a really nice poster sessions with many fruitful discussions (I mainly quizzed the atom interferometry people).

There was a strong recommendation from #JunYe to do a hiking tour, so we couldn't argue and went ahead to a 5km roundtrip to #GemLake near #EstesPark .
We had extremely beautiful views and very nice company - totally worth it!
(Also, our elk count increased to 3 - one was just calmly grazing in front of our hotel when we came back from dinner after the hike)

Day 3 of #ICOLS2023 !
Just a few talks today, as we went for an excursion after lunch. But still very interesting and relevant topics: #quantum #entanglement in #AtomInterferometry, a quantum system to emulate the complicated physics of glass, some more steps towards #QuantumComputing and an overview of miniaturized lasers for our experiments - trying to get rid of tables full of optical elements and lasers!

The excursion took us up to an elevation of 12,000 feet (3658 m) to the Alpine Vistor center in the #RockyMountains national park! The high elevation was quite noticable after a very short climb from the parking lot.
We unfortunately didn't have a lot of time up there, but the view above the tree line (with quite some residual snow) was amazing!
#ICOLS2023

We also stopped counting #elk encounters today - already saw an entire family having breakfast on the lawn in front of our rooms in the morning, then later two specimens clearly ignoring the rules and having a bath - and later the entire group joined in! There were also many on the steep and high parts of the mountain we crossed on our excursion.
#ICOLS2023

The day ended with a very nice conference dinner - and with talks by #JohnHall and #EricCornell who summarized the history of the #ICOLS conference within the last 60 years or so - basically talking about #laser #spectroscopy since the invention of the laser!
Both speakers made it very clear that a) you cannot do what they did without the strong support of a partner and b) that they probably should have spent more time with their families and less time in the lab/at conferences.
#ICOLS2023

Day 4 of #ICOLS2023 !
Today we heard a lot of about the different applications of highly precise #AtomicClocks (and #MolecularClocks) - for detecting height differences via the gravitational redshift, for testing the fundamental principles of #GeneralRelativity or for detecting/excluding #DarkMatter candidates!
There were also very nice theory contributions explaining the ideas for new #physics and showing us what we could see if only our experiments measured at a higher precision!

I used today's poster session to inform everyone about the papers we have written which would really help them understand their experiments better :D And I noticed that after more than 6 years of working on an experiment, I might get a bit sarcastic when young PhD students tell me what they want to achieve in the next few years. I wished them good luck in the end :'D
#ICOLS2023

We also had some time to explore #EstesPark downtown a bit - which is basically just a street full of souvenir shops with a lot of #Colorado T-shirts and moose, elk and bears in all different shapes XD
Of course we also saw another #elk - on a parking lot with elk-approved WiFi.
#ICOLS2023

I also finally realized today, that one PhD student also attending the conference, whose name sounded vaguely familiar, studied at the same university as I did (just started 2 years later) - and I probably graded some of his exercise sheets 10 years ago!
The world of physics is small, and sometimes you need to go around the globe to meet people from at home!
#ICOLS2023