
Nanotechnology keeps on growing
By Hamish Johnston in Portland, Oregon
The hottest party in town last night was the Institute of Physics Publishing reception at the Hilton Hotel. This year we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of our journal Nanotechnology and group publisher Nina Couzin gave a nice talk on the history of the journal and plans for the future.
Late last year, a special issue was published to commemorate the 20th volume of the journal. Many of the papers are free, so make sure you have a good browse of the content.
And no mention of nanotechnology is complete without a nod to nanotechweb.org, where you will find the latest research news.
The reception is a great way to gauge what’s hot and what’s not. After three days of sessions, folks were still very keen on topological insulators. But the session that everyone was talking about was Eugenie Samuel Reich’s talk about the “Schoen affair”.
Sadly, I missed her talk because I had already read her article on the scientific fraudster, which appeared in Physics World last year – an electronic version is available to IOP members only.
The most interesting conversation I had was with a theorist who recently shifted his research interests from high-Tc superconductors to topological insulators and graphene. Why? It was the look of horror on potential graduate students’ faces when he started to explain what he did!