Just a quick update from Darmstadt (Germany), where I’m spending the week at the 24th Quark Matter conference. Quark Matter is the largest conference series in nuclear physics (but not that nuclear physics or that other nuclear physics), and has been held about every year and a half since 1980, also in Darmstadt. You may remember my coverage of the last Quark Matter here on the blog; I won’t be posting quite so much this time because I’ve got a lot going on, but you may see a couple updates from me this week.

By the way, the decision of the Quark Matter 2012 organizers to give out (nice) backpacks as swag was, in my professional opinion as a physicist, the best thing in the history of the universe. Probably half of the people attending this conference came with their distinctive QM12 backpacks. The satchels they’re giving out this year aren’t bad, but they don’t quite measure up.

Today was Student Day, the day before the official start of the conference when everyone receiving student support (a waiver of the 500 Euro registration fee) comes to attend a set of lectures summarizing the various areas of physics covered by the conference. These lectures are given by leaders in the field, targeted at grad students and postdocs. Every Quark Matter features a Student Day, but one thing they did differently this year (at least different from last time) was have two parallel sessions on each topic: Observables and Concepts, a relatively introductory-level overview of the important concepts of the field, and Recent Developments, more of a high-level overview of recent progress in research. Personally I stayed in the Observables and Concepts room the whole day. (6 hours of physics, yikes!) I happen to think that you can never understand the basics too well, and even learning something you supposedly already know can still give you a new perspective which can come in handy. And indeed, I was not disappointed. Even though I’ve already been through one Quark Matter conference, and I know a lot of the buzzwords — I mean concepts — from most of the major research areas, there were still plenty of explanations of those same concepts that were pretty enlightening. I was even excited to understand about 80% (as opposed to 10% or 100%) of the talk on my own research area, saturation physics, which goes under the name of “pA and initial state” at this conference because it can be used to determine the initial state of the hydrodynamic evolution in a heavy ion collision.

There’s your buzzword package for the day. :-)

Anyway, it’s late and time to get off to sleep (ah, sweet sleep) to prepare for the start of the conference proper. As I mentioned, I’m not sure how much I’ll get to update the blog this week, but I will at least mention anything interesting I hear about on Twitter under the #QM2014 hashtag. Stay tuned!