Conferences in Ukraine

The first two international physics conferences I had the pleasure of attending, way back in September 2011, were held in Ukraine. This was also my first time travelling outside Australia. 

After 30 hours and 4 flights I landed in Kharkiv for the first conference, the International Workshop on Nonlinear Photonics (NLP*2011), held at the Kharkiv National University, located at the picturesque Svobody Square in the city centre.

Svobody Square. The statue of Lenin was torn down in 2014, replaced by a fountain in 2020, and presumably shelled in 2022.

Kharkiv was the home and origin of many great theoretical physicists. Landau and Lifschitz began writing their classic textbook series Course of Theoretical Physics there. Outside the auditorium in which the conference was held, attendees were greeted by an impressive Soviet-era mural.

The entrance to the conference auditorium. The university buildings were destroyed by Russian army shelling in March 2022.

This workshop was my first chance to meet many leading researchers working on nonlinear optics and singular optics, including the late Marat Soskin, who gave a memorable talk on the creation and destruction of topological defects in nematic liquid crystals. One afternoon my then-colleague and future Ignobel Prize Laureate Ivan Maksymov showed me around the city, which was where he had completed his physics studies.

 The following week I attended the Tenth International Conference on Correlation Optics, held at Chernivsti National University on the other side of the country, two flights and a train ride away.

 

The beautiful grounds of the Chernivsti National University, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, constructed between 1864 and 1882.

The Correlation Optics conference series is still going strong, with the next edition planned to be held in hybrid mode in September 2023. As one attendee aptly put it, "No one really knows what correlation optics is precisely, so its themes can continuously adapt to changes in research trends." At the time, one trend was the increasing availability of nanofabrication facilities leading to a transition from micro-optics to nano-optics.

Before dawn on the morning after the end of the conference, what seemed like all of the international attendees converged on the tiny Chernivsti Airport to catch the only international flight running that day. After "checking in" our baggage, we had to wheel it ourselves onto the tarmac to be loaded onto the small jet plane while we considered holding a post-conference session during the flight. 

I travelled onwards to Germany to visit collaborators at the University of Münster. Due to a chance encounter at ICOAM last year, we resumed our collaboration leading to a paper soon to be published in Photonics Research. But that's another story.