Las Vegas bears a striking resemblance to a shopping mall themed labyrinth. The good food did keep me content though. Considering there was nearly one thousand participants, the organization was great, they even had Elvis make an appearance at the conference dinner! It was an interesting few days, hundreds of presentations on basically three compounds (AlN, GaN, InN). In too many cases, basic science was overlooked in favour of ‘we made these thin films, they give X% quantum efficiency’. Alloy segregation, p-type doping, and polar vs non-polar growth seem to be the main issues that kept cropping up. A few people seemed interested in growing the Li(Mg,Zn)N alloys we suggested, which will be great if it works out. The next ICNS is in Korea 2009, I have no idea where I’ll be at the time, but hopefully I can make it along.
Some useful sites I have come across in the last couple of weeks: NIST-WebBook (thermodynamic data, and much more), Bandstructure Database (band structure plots for elemental/binary solids), Google Reader (RSS feed manager for journals which cuts out weekly searching through publisher sites and multiple email lists), Bilbao (Brillouin zones, special points and lattice sites for every space group).