Fall 1995 Meeting Report

The Joint Fall meeting of the Texas Section of the American Physical Society, the Texas Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers and Zone 13 of the Society of Physics Students was held at the Holiday Inn Lubbock Plaza and on th e campus of Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX, from Thursday evening 26 October through Saturday afternoon 28 October, 1995.

The meeting was hosted by the Physics Department of Texas Tech University, and was very well organized by the local committee:

M. A. K Lodhi (chair), C. Myles, M. Holz, D. Lamp and T. Sauncy

The Meeting consisted of 26 sessions and 13 workshops with 69 invited papers and 172 contributed papers presented. These are record statistics for the Texas Section meeting. This was the first time that the number of contributed papers has forced the meeting to be extended to all day Saturday, with ten parallel sessions. Over 515 persons registered. Attendance was 168 at the luncheon and 274 at the banquet. One highlight of the meeting was the Frontiers of Physics Session on Friday Morning. Speakers included Leon Lederman, Clifford Shull, Ilya Prigogine, and T. Nejat Veziroglu. Edward Teller had hoped to come, but was unable to attend. He did send a video which was shown in his time slot.

The SPS reception was held on Thursday evening with memorable and very long sandwiches and other edibles.

The traditional Chairs' Breakfast was held on Friday morning

The luncheon was followed by short business meetings of TSAPS and TS AAPT.

The Banquet was held in the Atrium Terrace, where the diners were treated to music from "Daddy Warbucks". In lieu of an after-banquet lecture, the participants were invited to a Halloween Physics Circus on the Texas Tech campus. We will not soon forget Igor (Gerald Bottrell), the "Mellow" Scientist (Wallace Glab), the Mad Scientist (Tom Gibson) and the Pendulum of Death (or was it Doom? I forget), the bloody bed of nails (oops!) and the tasty brain. Able assistance was provided by C. David Lamp,. J. Lee Burnside, Wendy Greig, Michael Cox, and Morgan (Mrs. Gerald) Bottrell. The Circus was followed by tours of the Tech physics labs.

Prizes of $150 were awarded for outstanding presentations of APS papers by undergraduate and graduate students who participated in the competition. The following students were winners: Scott V. Franklin, UT Austin, DF9: "Plasticity and the motion of dislocations through a discrete lattice"; S. Liu, Texas Tech U., BB4: "Infrared and optical investigation of hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H) and its alloys (a-C:H4N3F)"; E. Parkey, U. North Texas, CD9: "Mechanism for the formation of mounds and pits on gold using scanning tunneling microscopy"; T. Sauncy, Texas Tech U., CD5: "Temperature dependent lifetime and pressure studies of self-activated photoluminescence in doped GaAs"; Mark Sosebee, UT Austin, BD4: "Searches for supersymmetry with the D0 detector"; S. F. Yelin, Max Planck Institut fur Quantenoptik and TAMU, BC7, "Q uantum corrections to the Lorentz-Lorentz formula"; D. Young, Texas Tech U., DE7: "Study of slow wave structures in a backward wave oscillator."