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This guide is intended for the Chapman undergraduate students who are attending this year’s APS Global Summit. It may be useful for others as well.

The APS Global Summit is a ginormous event, featuring dozens of parallel sessions at any given time. It can be exciting for first-time attendees, but also overwhelming. Here, I compile some advice on how to navigate the meeting and some suggestions for sessions and events you might like to attend.

General Advice

• Use the online schedule and the mobile app to help you navigate the meeting. If you create a login, the online schedule allows you to add things to your personalized schedule, which you can view on the app at the meeting. This is a very useful thing to do because making decisions of where to go on the fly is difficult.
• Do not overschedule yourself. I know it is tempting to figure out how to go to as many things as you can, and run between sessions on opposite sides of the convention center. This will be harder to accomplish than you imagine. The meeting gets very crowded and it is exhausting to sit through a full three-hour session of talks. Schedule some break time and, where possible, schedule blocks of time in one location rather than running all over the place.
• You will have noticed that most talks at the meeting are 12min long (10min + 2min). These are called contributed talks. Since they are so short, they are more like adverts for the work than a detailed explanation. They are usually aimed at experts and, quite frankly, many speakers do not know how to give these talks well. It is not worth attending these talks unless one of the following applies:
  • You are already an expert in that research area.
  • You are strongly considering doing research in that area.
  • You are there to support your friends and colleagues who are speaking in that session.
  • You are so curious about the research area that you are prepared to sit through a lot of opaque talks to get some idea of what is going on in the area.
  • The session is on a topic that is unusually accessible or the session is aimed at undergraduate students.
• Instead, you should prioritize attending the following kinds of talks, which you can search for using the filters on the schedule:
  • Plenary talks: These are aimed at a general physics audience and are usually by famous speakers (famous by physics standards anyway). Some of these might also be…
  • Popular science talks: Aimed at the general public.
  • Invited Sessions: These sessions consist of 30min talks by invited speakers in a common research area. There is no guarantee that they will be accessible to novices, but it is much more likely than with the contributed talks. Go to any invited sessions on areas of physics you are curious about.
  • Focus Sessions: Focus sessions consist mainly of contributed talks, but they also have one or two 30min invited talks. It is not considered rude to switch sessions between talks, so do not be afraid to just attend the invited talks. They are not always scheduled at the beginning of the session. In fact, some groups deliberately stagger the times of the invited talks so that people can see the invited talks in more than one focus session.
• There are sessions that list “Undergraduate Students” as part of their target audience. A lot of these are “Undergraduate Research” sessions. It can be interesting to go to one or two of these to see the variety of undergraduate research experiences that are on offer. However, I would not advise only going to sessions on this list. For one thing, undergraduate research projects are not banned from the other sessions, so many of the best undergraduate projects will not be in those sessions. Going to sessions by topic is a better bet most of the time.
• It is helpful to filter the sessions on the schedule by the organizing Unit (Division, Topical Group, or Forum). You can find a list of APS units here. For example, if you are particularly interested in Quantum Information and Computation then you will want to look at the sessions organized by DQI (Division of Quantum Information). Sessions organized by Forums are often particularly accessible, as they tend to be about less technical issues (DEI, Education, History and Philosophy, etc.)

The next sections contain some more specific suggestions about events, talks and sessions that you might like to attend.

Orientation and Networking Events

I have never been to an orientation or networking event at the APS meeting, but then again I did not go to the APS meeting as a student. Networking is one of the best things you can do at the meeting, so do take any opportunities to meet and talk to people.

Sunday March 16

Time	Event	Location
2:00pm – 3:00pm	First Time Attendee Orientation	Anaheim Convention Center, 201AB (Level 2)
3:00pm – 4:00pm	Undergraduate Student Get Together	Anaheim Convention Center, 201AB (Level 2)

Tuesday March 18

Time	Event	Location
12:30pm – 2:00pm	Students Lunch with the Experts	Anaheim Convention Center, Exhibit Hall B

The student lunch with the Experts is especially worth it because you get a one-on-eight meeting with a physicist who works on a topic you are interested in. You also get a free lunch. Spaces are limited, so you need to sign up for it on the Sunday, and early if you want to get your choice of expert.

Generally speaking, food is very expensive in the convention center. Therefore, the more places you can get free food the better. There are networking events, some of which are aimed at students and some of which have free meals. Other good bets for free food include the receptions and business meetings. (With a business meeting you may have to first sit through a boring administrative meeting for an APS unit, but at least the DQI meeting will feature me talking about The Quantum Times.)

Sessions Chaired by Chapman Faculty

The next few sections highlight talks and sessions that involve people at Chapman. You may want to come to these not only to support local people, but also to find out more about areas of research that you might want to do undergraduate research projects in.

The following sessions are being chaired by Chapman faculty. The chair does not give a talk during the session, but acts as a host. But chairs usually work in the areas that the session is about, so it is a good way to get more of an overview of things they are interested in.

Day	Time	Chair	Session Title	Location
Monday 17	11:30pm – 1:54pm	Matt Leifer	Quantum Foundations: Bell Inequalities and Causality	Anaheim Convention Center, 256B (Level 2)
Wednesday 19	8:00am – 10:48am	Andrew Jordan	Optimal Quantum Control	Anaheim Convention Center, 258A (Level 2)
Wednesday 19	11:30am – 1:30pm	Bibek Bhandari	Explorations in Quantum Computing	Virtual Only, Room 1

Talks involving Chapman Faculty, Postdocs and Students

The talks listed below all have someone who is currently affiliated with Chapman as one or more of the authors. The Chapman person is not necessarily the person giving the talk.

The people giving the talks, especially if they are students or postdocs, would appreciate your support. It is also a good way of finding out more about research that is going on at Chapman.

Monday March 17

Time	Speaker	Title	Location
9:36am – 9:48am	Irwin Huang	Beyond Single Photon Dissipation in Kerr Cat Qubits	Ahaheim Convention Center, 161 (Level 1)
9:48am – 10am	Bingcheng Qing	Benchmarking Single-Qubit Gates on a Noise-Biased Qubit: Kerr cat qubit	Anaheim Convention Center, 161 (Level 1)
10:12am – 10:24am	Ahmed Hjar	Strong light-matter coupling to protect quantum information with Schrodinger cat states	Anaheim Convention Center, 161 (Level 1)
10:24am – 10:36am	Bibek Bhandari	Decoherence in dynamically protected qubits	Anaheim Convention Center, 161 (Level 1)
10:36am – 10:48am	Ke Wang	Control-Z two-qubit gate on 2D Kerr cats	Anaheim Convention Center, 161 (Level 1)
4:12pm – 4:24pm	Adithi Ajith	Stabilizing two-qubit entanglement using stochastic path integral formalism	Anaheim Convention Center, 258A (Level 2)
4:36pm – 4:48 pm	Alok Nath Singh	Capturing an electron during a virtual transition via continuous measurement	Anaheim Convention Center, 252B (Level 2)

Tuesday March 18

Time	Speaker	Title	Location
8:48am – 9:00am	Alexandria O Udenkwo	Characterizing the energy and efficiency of an entanglement fueled engine in a circuit QED processor	Anaheim Convention Center, 162 (Level 1)
12:30pm – 12:42pm	Yile Ying	A review and analysis of six extended Wigner’s friend arguments	Anaheim Convention Center, 256B (Level 2)
1:54pm – 2:06pm	Indrajit Sen	ΡΤ-symmetric axion electrodynamics: A pilot-wave approach	Anaheim Marriott, Platinum 1
3:48pm – 4:00pm	Chuanhong Liu	Planar Fluxonium Qubits Design with 4-way Coupling	Anaheim Convention Center, 162 (Level 1)
4:36pm – 4:48pm	Robert Czupryniak	Reinforcement Learning Meets Quantum Control – Artificially Intelligent Maxwell’s Demon	Anaheim Convention Center, 258A (Level 2)

Wednesday March 19

Time	Speaker	Title	Location
10:36am – 10:48am	Dominic Briseno-Colunga	Dynamical Sweet Spot Manifolds of Bichromatically Driven Floquet Qubits	Anaheim Convention Center, 162 (Level 1)
2:30pm – 2:42pm	Sayani Ghosh	Equilibria and Effective Rates of Transition in Astromers	Anaheim Marriott, Platinum 7
3:00pm – 3:12pm	Matt Leifer	A Foundational Perspective on PT-Symmetric Quantum Theory	Anaheim Convention Center, 151 (Level 1)
5:36pm – 5:48pm	Sacha Greenfield	A unified picture for quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects	Anaheim Convention Center, 161 (Level 1)

Thursday March 20

Time	Speaker	Title	Location
1:18pm – 1:30pm	Lucas Burns	Delayed Choice Lorentz Transformations on a Qubit	Anaheim Convention Center, 256B (Level 2)
4:48pm – 5:00pm	Noah J Stevenson	Design of fluxonium coupling and readout via SQUID couplers	Anaheim Convention Center, 161 (Level 1)
5:00pm – 5:12pm	Kagan Yanik	Flux-Pumped Symmetrically Threaded SQUID Josephson Parametric Amplifier	Anaheim Convention Center, 204C (Level 2)
5:00pm – 5:12pm	Abhishek Chakraborty	Two-qubit gates for fluxonium qubits using a tunable coupler	Anaheim Convention Center, 161 (Level 1)

Friday March 21

Time	Speaker	Title	Location
10:12am – 10:24am	Nooshin M. Estakhri	Distinct statistical properties of quantum two-photon backscattering	Anaheim Convention Center, 253A (Level 2)
10:48am – 11:00am	Le Hu	Entanglement dynamics in collision models and all-to-all entangled states	Anaheim Hilton, San Simeon AB (Level 4)
11:54am – 12:06pm	Luke Valerio	Optimal Design of Plasmonic Nanotweezers with Genetic Algorithm	Anaheim Convention Center, 253A (Level 2)

Posters involving Chapman Faculty, Postdocs and Students

Poster sessions last longer than talks, so you can view the posters at your leisure. The presenter is supposed to stand by their poster and talk to people who come to see it. The following posters are being presented by Chapman undergraduates. Please drop by and support them.

Thursday March 20, 10:00am – 1:00pm, Anaheim Convention Center, Exhibit Hall A

Poster Number	Presenter	Title
267	Ponthea Zahraii	Machine learning-assisted characterization of optical forces near gradient metasurfaces
400	Clara Hunt	What the white orchid can teach us about radiative cooling
401	Nathan Taormina	Optimizing Insulation and Geometrical Designs for Enhanced Sub-Ambient Radiative Cooling Efficiency

Leifer’s Recommendations

These are sessions that reflect my own interests. It is a good bet that you will find me at one of these, unless I am teaching, or someone I know is speaking somewhere else. There are multiple sessions at the same time, but what I will typically do is select the one that has the most interesting looking talk at the time and switch sessions from time to time or take a break from sessions entirely if I get bored.

Monday March 17

Time	Session Title	Location
8:00am – 11:00am	Quantum Science and Technology at the National DOE Research Centers: Progress and Opportunities	Anaheim Convention Center, 158 (Level 1)
8:00am – 11:00am	Learning and Benchmarking Quantum Channels	Anaheim Convention Center, 258A (Level 2)
10:45am – 12:33pm	Beginners Guide to Quantum Gravity	Anaheim Marriott, Grand Ballroom Salon E
11:30am – 1:54pm	Quantum Foundations: Bell Inequalities and Causality	Anaheim Convention Center, 256B (Level 2)
1:30pm – 3:18pm	History and Physics of the Manhattan Project and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki	Anaheim Marriott, Platinum 9
3:00pm – 6:00pm	DQI Thesis Award Session	Anaheim Convention Center, 158 (Level 1)

Tuesday March 18

Time	Session Title	Location
8:30am – 10:18am	Forum on Outreach and Engagement of the Public Invited Session	Anaheim Marriott, Orange County Salon 1
10:45am – 12:33pm	Pais Prize Session	Anaheim Marriott, Platinum 2
11:30am – 2:30pm	Applied Quantum Foundations	Anaheim Convention Center, 256B (Level 2)
1:30pm – 3:18pm	Mini-Symposium: Research Validated Assessments in Education	Anaheim Marriott, Grand Ballroom Salon D
1:30pm – 3:18pm	Research in Quantum Mechanics Instruction	Anaheim Marriott, Orange County Salon 1
3:00pm – 5:24pm	Landauer-Bennett Award Prize Symposium	Anaheim Convention Center, 158 (Level 1)
3:00pm – 6:00pm	Undergraduate and Graduate Education I	Anaheim Convention Center, 263A (Level 2)
3:00pm – 6:00pm	Invited Session for the Forum on Outreach and Engagement of the Public	Anaheim Convention Center, 155 (Level 1)
3:45pm – 5:33pm	Highlights from the Special Collections of AJP and TPT on Teaching About Quantum	Anaheim Marriott, Platinum 3
6:15pm – 9:00pm	DQI Business Meeting	Anaheim Convention Center, 160 (Level 1)

Wednesday March 19

Time	Session Title	Location
11:30am – 2:30pm	Quantum Information: Thermodynamics out of Equilibrium	Anaheim Hilton, San Simeon AB (Level 4)
3:00pm – 5:36pm	Quantum Foundations: Measurements, Contextuality, and Classicality	Anaheim Convention Center, 151 (Level 1)
3:00pm – 6:00pm	Beyond Knabenphysik: Women in the History of Quantum Physics	Anaheim Convention Center, 154 (Level 1)

Thursday March 20

Time	Session Title	Location
8:00am – 10:48am	Undergraduate Education	Anaheim Convention Center, 263A (Level 2)
8:00am – 11:00am	Open Quantum Systems and Many-Body Dynamics	Anaheim Hilton, San Simeon AB (Level 4)
11:30am – 2:30pm	Time in Quantum Mechanics and Thermodynamics	Anaheim Hilton, California C (Ballroom Level)
11:30am – 2:30pm	Intersections of Quantum Science and Society	Anaheim Convention Center, 159 (Level 1)
11:30am – 2:18pm	Quantum Foundations: Relativity, Gravity, and Geometry	Anaheim Convention Center, 256B (Level 2)
3:00pm – 6:00pm	The Early History of Quantum Information Physics	Anaheim Convention Center, 154 (Level 1)
3:00pm – 6:00pm	Quantum Thermalization: Understanding the Dynamical Foundation of Quantum Thermodynamics	Anaheim Hilton, California A (Ballroom Level)

Friday March 21

Time	Session Title	Location
8:00am – 11:00am	Structures in Quantum Systems	Anaheim Convention Center, 258A (Level 2)
8:00am – 10:24am	Science Communication in an Age of Misinformation and Disinformation	Anaheim Convention Center, 156 (Level 1)

The Exhibition Hall

It is worthwhile to spend some time in the exhibit hall. It features a Careers Fair and a Grad School Fair, which will be larger and more relevant to physics students than other such fairs you might attend in the area.

But, of course, the main purpose of going to the exhibition hall is to acquire SWAG. Some free items I have obtained from past APS exhibit halls include:

• Rubik’s cubes
• Balls that light up when you bounce them
• Yo-Yos
• Wooden model airplanes
• Snacks
• T-shits
• Tote bags
• Enough stationery items to last for the rest of your degree
• Free magazines and journals
• Free or heavily discounted books

I recommend going when the hall first opens to get the highest quality SWAG.

Fun Stuff

Other fun stuff to do at this year’s meeting includes:

• QuantumFest: This starts with the Quantum Jubilee event on Saturday, but there are events all week some of which you have to be registered for the meeting for. Definitely reserve a spot for the LabEscape escpae room. I have done one of their rooms before and it is fun.
• Physics Rock-n-Roll Singalong: A very nerdy APS meeting tradition. Worth attending once in your life. Probably only once though.