nano2006: Day II

Second day started with a usual busy note, the main hall was filled before nine and just over nine there was a decent crowd inside. The morning sessions began with couple of plenary lectures. Two stalwart from Japan, Prof. Inoue and Prof. Aono set the day for the participants, physical metallurgy and functional materials became more interesting from morning! Prof. Inoue the pioneer in bulk metallic glasses talked about lanthanide based system and also the true bulk glass with diameter of 100 nm. Prof. Aono discussed nanowires and primarily the CNTs. I had to attend the talks under theme B, the first invited talk was by Enrique Lavernia from UCD on the cryo milled nanostructured materials, a novel technique to form nano grained Al, Cu. He talked also about the high ductility of the material with bimodal microstructure, nano metals is moving towards this direction, yesterday Prof. Mukherjee and Prof. Valiev had talked about it and today Enrique. Ruth Swaiger from FZK had something different to talk. It was the grain growth in the edges of the nanoindented Ni, there were many questions about the process but she threw the idea of athermal, stress induced grain growth in these materials. Prof Rodriguez talked about the Hall Petch and inverse Hall Petch relation. I wanted to attend a talk on the nanoporous alumina protein bio markers, unfortunately the speaker did not turn up! Today the conference got true colours, the colorful pics from the mixture party and poster session yesterday came today. Today was also the day for making new contacts, well I got to know few people and there were more going on, of course it is a rare opportunity of discussions. The second a session started with a talk by Uwe Erb, he talked about the thermal stability of nan Ni, in my lab Prasad and Ravi had already worked with this material, they were quite thick plates, the concern is with sulpher content. The second talk I attended was by Rajesh Kumar a grad student from Punjub Engineering College. It was on optical tweezers. I did not know about the technology and was curious to know. They were using mysine and was passing a laser through the molecule in the fluid. From the image analysis they were figuring out the parameters, it was quite good piece of work. The could measure load as low as 0.3 pN and a displacement of 677 nm. Prita Pant in the structural materials section talked about modeling of dislocations dynamics. Kartik almost had a discussion with her during question answer sessions. Poster sessions was quite enriched though I did not have much to get from them still had quite good discussions with Rejin on his work on hydroxyapatite, on carrying out indentation on non basal planes. Arindam also had a nice poster as well as Dibyendu. Kotts got quite a bit of crowd for his poster. There were much on functional materials but I couldn’t pick much from them. Tomorrow I have my turn to present my poster.
Evening was the banquet time, good food nice drinks and nice ambience had great time with friends from the dept. and Abi! The torch for nano2008 was handed over to Rio De Janeiro also today evening and now time to talk about some unfortunate events, some “Indian scientists (!!??)” who were being put up in NIAS guest house behaved so badly with me and my few juniors that it almost took me to my undergrad days, it was surprising how mean people can become, anyway I felt very bad because these people are testing the patients of my colleagues everyday day and night. Do we really need everyone to run a conference? Hats of to the guys carrying out transportation job, looks like more pains are still there.

Tomorrow morning session and afternoon sessions