The return of the (in-person) conferences

This May was a very busy month with two in-person (!) conferences. After a hiatus of around two years, due to the pandemic, we returned to a “normal” conference season. For me, these were the first in-person conferences since Fall 2019, and also the first (in-person) ones as a postdoc. I have summarized some ideas and highlights from them below.

First Annual ELEMENTS conference

ELEMENTS is a research cluster in Hesse, Germany which brings together scientists from different disciplines to explore the universe from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale. Its ultimate goal is to address the question of the origin of the heavy chemical elements, like gold and silver in the cosmos.

I recently joined ELEMENTS, and this May the research cluster organized its first annual conference at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies and Giersch Science Center. It was a three-day conference, with talks and posters from scientists of the four working areas, covering topics such as the nuclear equation of state (EOS), simulations of neutron star mergers, nucleosynthesis and nuclear physics experiments.

I was given the opportunity to give a talk on my latest work regarding the weak r-process nucleosynthesis. My personal highlight was the overview talk by Hans-Thomas Janka from TU München regarding the latest advancements in simulations an nucleosynthesis in core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers.

You can read more about the conference in this article.

JINA-CEE Frontiers in Nuclear Astrophysics

The JINA-CEE Frontiers conference was a great opportunity to meet and discuss with many friends and collaborators from the nuclear astrophysics community. This conference was a week-long affair, with the first two days dedicated to young researchers, one day about the IReNA network and the last two days in regular nuclear astrophysics contributions.

I participated in the poster session, with a contribution about my recent project, which was praised by the people that stopped by.

My personal highlights

• Ian Roederer’s talk on the observation of a metal-poor star with a complete r-process abundance pattern. The talk is based on the recent work by the R-Process Alliance - arXiv:2205.03426 [astro-ph]. This star, HD 222925, can be seen in the southern constellation of Tucana and with 65 observed elements, it has the most complete abundance set beyond the Sun. Roederer argued in his talk that this is the ‘gold standard star’ that we should use as the r-process pattern when we perform nucleosynthesis calculations, instead of the solar residuals.

• Matt Mumpower’s talk on using Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for nuclear data for astrophysics. He started his talk with the image below, which is made from Google Imagen, just by providing the caption in a text format. Mumpower presented on his latest work using ML to predict nuclear masses relevant for the r-process - arXiv:2203.10594 [nucl-th]. You can find the slides here.

• Alfredo Estrade’s overview talk about r-process experiments and the new results of β-decays relevant for weak r-process nucleosynthesis. He covered many different and interesting techniques, and there was also an honourable mention about my contribution to the SECAR experiments for (α,n) reactions.