Day 2 of the 3-beams conference saw many more good papers (and one exceptionally bad one – the other people in the room know which one I am talking about). I was especially fascinated with the work on metamaterials that can produce a negative refractive index. Such materials, which have been demonstrated in the past in the microwave regime, tax the scientific imagination and have led to many popular claims such as the possibility of making planar “superlenses”, invisibility cloaks, and other such sci-fi oddities. Unfortunately, it seems that the definition of what it takes to show negative refraction is slowly expanding to encompass phenomena that, while admittedly very interesting, might best be explained in another way.

Ivan Lalovic of Cymer gave a god paper on the influence of speckle on line edge roughness – a topic that needs attention. I also saw some papers on molecular glass resists, and I become more skeptical of this class of materials each time I hear about them.

At the end of the day, we all loaded up into buses and went to the Portland Zoo for the conference banquet. We were quite fortunate with regards to wind direction, otherwise appetizers and cocktails next to the elephant pens could have been very unpleasant. The dinner ended with the 14th annual micrograph contest – a fascinating blend of science and art. Past years’ winners can be found at www.zyvexlabs.com/EIPBNuG/uGraph.html, and this years winners will be posted soon. These pictures definitely confirm the site’s slogan that “A good Micrograph is worth more than the MegaByte it consumes.”