Report on the presentation at the Gordon research conference on “Oscillation and dynamic instability in chemical systems” and a visit to a research group in MIT.

Jun Miyazaki, Doctoral Student

　Report on the presentation at the Gordon research conference on “Oscillation and dynamic instability in chemical systems” and a visit to a research group in MIT.

Destination
Bates Collage, Lewiston, Maine & Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Outline of the trip
i) Purpose of the trip
I made a trip to present a poster at the conference on chemical oscillation and discuss with many researchers who were in the forefront of this field. I also visited to a research group in MIT studying time-resolved spectroscopy to discuss how we investigate the dynamic instability in chemical oscillations in combination with laser spectroscopic techniques.

ii) Details
The Gordon research conference on “Oscillation and dynamic instability in chemical systems” was held during July 18-23 in Bates collage, located at the northeast end of the USA. This conference addressed Nonlinear Chemical Dynamics, which included the study of oscillations, waves, patterns and chaos in chemically-reacting systems far from equilibrium, with experiments, theory and simulations. About one hundred participants from all parts of the worlds presented exciting studies and discussed animatedly with each other. I presented a poster about a coupled oscillator in Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction, one of the typical chemical oscillation.
Recently, chemical oscillation has been applied to many systems, such as polymeric gels for micro/nano machine, computing with chemical waves,　stripe pattern formation on the animal skin, coupling of two or many oscillators and so on. Especially, polymer gels in chemical oscillation have been extensively studied for industrial application in the future. Therefore, there were many reports about gel systems at the conference. On the other hands, several participants in the conference also studied coupled oscillators in chemical systems, which had a close relation to my experiments. I. Z. Kiss and Y. Zhai reported about synchronization and cooperative action of coherent groups in globally coupled electrochemical oscillators. H. Fukuda has arranged BZ beads-oscillators in 2D lattice and observed synchronization enhanced under optimal noise, which impressed me above all presentations. Many people paid attention to my poster presentation. Although I felt the difficulty of speaking in English, it seemed that they understood what I said. We discussed and exchanged ideas with each other. I was glad to present a poster at the conference, in which many famous researchers participated and moreover, appreciated my results. That was why I felt encouraged.
After the conference, I visited ｔhe Nelson group in MIT and presented my experimental results. They studied dynamic properties in complex materials, such as glass, with time-resolved spectroscopic techniques which could also be used for chemical systems. Unfortunately most of the members were in Japan to attend the conference on Ultrafast phenomena at Niigata. However, we discussed productively for methods in measuring complex systems with laser techniques.

iii) Benefit from the trip
The trip to USA was valuable experience for me, especially from the following two points.
(i) I learned recent trends in coupled oscillation through the talk with several researchers involved in the fields.
(ii) In MIT, I was suggested that interferometer imaging may practical in measuring dynamic instability in chemical systems.

iv) Prospective and future plans
I will continue to investigate dynamic instability in chemical oscillation as the suggestion of the MIT group.

Finally, I express my gratitude to the COE financial support for the trip.