I spent last week in Portland for the APS March meeting. It was one of my favorite APS meetings so far. First, the city has some free public transportation, is walkable, and very fun. I got to see many old friends. And I ended up giving two talks.
The first talk was on our PRL paper Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory for Open Quantum Systems with Unitary Propagation.
The session was very interesting, with many proposals for how to expand the realm of applicability of TD-DFT. My boss was supposed to give this talk, but ended up canceling his trip at the last minute.
The second talk was on our paper Linear assignment maps for correlated system-environment states.
This talk was part of the OQS and Decoherence session. For some reason, this session is always on Friday afternoon, which is always the least attended day at the APS, as many leave the conference early. Can this be changed? Still, I got all the usual questions about negative maps, so people were somewhat interested.
How are the sessions organized? How are the days chosen, how are the talks in the session organized? I don’t know. Hopefully, next year, my talk will be at a reasonable day and time.
—
At dawn of day, when you dislike being called, have this thought ready: “I am called to man’s labour; why then do I make a difficulty if I am going out to do what I was born to do and what I was brought into the world for? Is it for this that I am fashioned, to lie in bedclothes and keep myself warm?” “But this is more pleasant.” “Were you born then to please yourself; in fact for feeling, not for action? Can’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees each doing his own work, helping for their part to adjust a world? And then you refuse to do a man’s office and don’t make haste to do what is according to your own nature.” “But a man needs rest as well.”
-Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, on how hard it is for a roman emperor to get up in the morning
Minus Two Fish 
The sessions are decided and scheduled by the topical groups or divisions that sponsor them, which in the case of the OQS and Decoherence session is the Topical Group on Quantum Information. If you have comments about the scheduling then you should show up to the business meeting and have a chat to the relevant people and/or write to them via the contact details on the website http://www.aps.org/units/gqi/ Also, it goes without saying that you should join the TGQI if you are interested in QI.
Not having been on the committee myself, I can’t comment too much on how the scheduling is decided. However, I have noticed in the past that sessions about implementations and/or sessions with crossover to other groups tend to get the best slots. This often sidelines stuff that I personally find interesting, but it is only natural, since these sessions are likely to get the biggest audiences. To some extent the APS meeting is more about advertising QI to the rest of the physics community than it is about having the best QI meeting possible, and the scheduling makes more sense if you think about it that way.
Finally, if you feel strongly that a certain topic should have a higher profile at the March meeting then you can always propose to organize an invited session about it, as these tend to get the best slots. The TGQI always solicits proposals for these a few months before the meeting.
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I am a member of the GQI and did go to the business meeting last week, but I didn’t know if they were responsible for the Decoherence session. I’ll email some people there to find out more about this. Thanks!
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