#WIDOMSUMVAC — Shanghai: Day Two

Got up at 8AM sharp and dived into the lovely breakfast buffet at my Shanghai Tongmao Hotel, which is delightfully located across the street from NYU Shanghai, and I arrived at my office at 10AM. The lovely thing about the 13-hour time difference is that about noon here is about midnight at LSU, and all the emails stop in time to go to lunch. 

 An interesting lunchtime option at the NYU cafeteria.

Lunch with Byrnes Group. 
LSU PhD Students Chenglong You and Sushovit Adhikari left front.

Then I caffeinate up at the Starbucks with a tall flat white (double-tall-wet cappuccino) and then chaos time commences at 1:30PM where we hammered out over 10 new research project ideas in four hours and still had time for LSU PhD students Chenglong You and Sushovit Adhikari to give a presentation on their work on boson-sampling-inspired quantum metrology, some of which has just been beautifully verified in the lab of Profs. J. W. Pan and C.-Y. Lu at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). We’ll be visiting the USTC Shanghai campus on Friday to hammer out new research directions and experimental collaborations.

 Chaos time is carefully scheduled.

Then after brainstorming for four hours (storm>>brain) we generated over 10 topics to work on over the two weeks I'm here. Typically by the end of the two weeks we have whittled those ten to about two where we have enough of an idea how to proceed to begin fleshing them out and eventually publishing them in a journal.

LSU PhD student Sushovit Adhikari summarizes all the ideas for research projects.

After the storm subsided, we retired to the Blue Frog for happy hour and continued discussions before heading out to the local Szechuan restaurant for spicy food and a traditional Chinese “face off” dance. 

 The frog is blue like Eric's shirt! Tim Byrnes to left and his students Eric Song and Louis Tessler.

Face off dance!

 LSU PhD student Sushovit Adhikary warily eyes the fried chicken on a stick. "Who gets to eat the head?" he wonders.  In the end LSU PhD student Chenglong You beats him to it. In the back is Tim's postdoc,  Ebubechukwu Ilo-Okeke, and Research Assistant, José Eduardo Cejudo Grano de Oro.

My co-PhD student, Naieme Mohseni, and Tim's research assistant, Chenyu Zhang,  
discuss quantum physics and the meaning of the universe.

I show Naeime how to use chopsticks — the wrong way!

 I challenge Tim Byrnes to a duel with chopsticks.

 The plans for the next two weeks are set and Tuesday we begin calculations in earnest. In a great collaboration my student Naeime Moseni from Iran, who I am co-PhD supervisor of, is here for a month visiting the Byrnes' group and we have a chance tomorrow to respond to the referees of our Physical Review A paper, and plan the research projects for the next year.  It is all very international here and all very exciting.