Industrial Physics Forum 2014: Frontiers in industrial and applied physics

The American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics Today) recently concluded their third joint Industrial Physics Forum (IPF). Held in Denver, 4–6 March, as part of the APS March Meeting, the IPF was organized jointly by the APS Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics (FIAP) and AIP’s Corporate Associates . The chair of the program planning committee was Dave Seiler from NIST, vice chair of FIAP and past chair of the Corporate Associates Advisory Committee.

Seiler and his planning committee organized an unprecedented seven invited sessions over three days around the theme of frontiers in industrial and applied physics. The talks featured speakers, primarily from the private sector, who illustrated the diverse ways in which physics and physicists are contributing economically in the private sector. The speakers from government labs and academia demonstrated how innovation and economic growth in the US are driven by the complex R&D ecosystem in which industry, government, and higher education interact in robust and productive ways.

Attendance at the IPF sessions testified to how important it is to bring a concentrated industrial perspective into scientific meetings. While APS meetings have always included speakers from the private sector, sessions are not often devoted entirely to speakers from industry to talk about physics in their companies. March Meeting attendees responded enthusiastically to the IPF, with attendance averaging around 150 per speaker. Many speakers nearly filled the room with 300–400 attendees.

Celebrating the SQUID

The organizers took the opportunity of this IPF to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). Much like the solid-state transistor, which was invented at Bell Labs, and the integrated circuit, which was invented at Texas Instruments, the SQUID is an extremely impactful invention from a corporate research laboratory. The SQUID came out of General Motors R&D, and is yet another example of corporate-funded research resulting in a broadly applied, hugely successful invention based on fundamental physics.

Similar to other devices, the SQUID has been used for applications far beyond GM, and the IPF illustrated its broad utility. For example, Kent Irwin from Stanford University described how the SQUID is used in photon detection devices for measurements in such diverse settings as astronomy and materials science. On the industrial side, Catherine Foley, from CSIRO in Australia, told of the SQUID’s critical importance to the Australian economy and how it facilitated the discovery of minerals such as silver.

Lasers, SQUIDs, transistors, and so many other economically transformative devices are examples of the role played by central industrial research labs in the 20th century. The role of industrial physics research has evolved considerably over the past 20 years, and this was the topic of a press briefing held as part of the IPF. The briefing featured representatives from companies that have historically had major research labs (IBM, Texas Instruments, and Dow Chemical). They had broad-ranging discussion of the role of physics and physicists in their companies’ successes, and how that role is evolving with their companies’ changing priorities for and management of research.

The IPF was also very popular among students. The final session was a panel discussion of speakers from a variety of companies, including IBM, Agilent, Schlumberger, Asylum Research, Intel, and Texas Instruments. The students, excited about their own prospects for a career outside of academia, dominated the Q&A period with many questions about how to make the leap from academia to industry.

The IPF also gave the Corporate Associates Advisory Committee (CAAC) an occasion to meet. CAAC is unusual among AIP’s advisory committees, in that it plays a major role in planning programs—in this case, partnering with Member Societies to plan IPFs. The primary focus of this CAAC meeting was to look ahead to IPF Brazil (28 September–3 October 2014, at the University of Campinas) and to choose a location for our first IPF in 2015. The CAAC enthusiastically accepted a proposal from AVS to co-organize an IPF at the October 2015 AVS meeting in San Jose, California, with a focus on industrial applications of the growing field of mesoscale physics.

The full program along with videos of the talks can be found on the IPF2014 website .

Bo Hammer is the associate vice president, physics resources, at the American Institute of Physics.