Invited talk at GRS: Mechanical Systems in the Quantum Regime

I had the absolute pleasure of attending my first ever Gordons Research Seminar as well as the Gordons Research Conference in Mechanical Systems in the Quantum Regime. This occurs every 2 years and brings together the community of optomehanics, electromechanics & quantum theory from all around the world. The GRC has nearly 200 attendees! It was held in Ventura, California. 

My talk was titled 'Development & field testing of an automated portable optomechanical accelerometer' which I presented on the 25th Feb. I was really nervous it would be too engineering/application focused compared so some more fundamental physics work being presented but the feedback was really humbling! Many people liked the change of tone & I hope it inspires some of the Ph.D. students/post-docs to seek exciting adventures working with industry/field-testing their experiments!

The GRS/C is brilliant because it strongly encourages you to present non-published results; and yep, there were some jaw-opening moments where Professors announced some exciting hot-of-the-optical-bench data that made me so excited to get back into the lab. I too, presented results from two papers I'm preparing for publication this year - had a bit of a delay due to commercial sensitivity (patents being drafted) and then the whirlwind of prototyping to a deadline...

I saw some old friends (Dr. James Millen, Dr. Stefan Kuhn, David Grass and the entire Aspelmeyer group really!) and we found some others to go have proper American food at a diner in Ventura. 

I have to give a shout-out to some brilliant NEW scientists that I ended up talking to and getting to know personally; Charles D Brown at Yale (working with Glen Harris - also super cool dude, levitated superfluid Helium with my fave; the whispering gallery mode), Anja Metelmann (Princeton, now in Berlin, theory of non-reciprocity in optical systems) who I spent so many breaks talking about being a woman in science, Nancy Aggrawal (LIGO, full of great ideas about noise in detection) who had 3D prinited gravitational wave signal earrings....the list really does go on!

It's also a chance to kinda meet your thesis heros; the guys who paved the way in optomechanics (Kippenberg, Schliesser, Aspelmeyer, Bhave, Clerk, Purdy, Vanner, Lehnert, Rabl, Rauschenbeutal, Bahl, Marquardt, Barclay, Painter, Regal, Geraci, Polzik, Cleland, Romero-Isart ... etc etc)...it sounds like a list of Ikea furniture but all these people are cited in my Ph.D thesis!