The Hot Vapor Workshop, organised by the University of Stuttgart in collaboration with macQsimal was the expected highlight of this spring. The event on 22-24 March 2021 was the second edition of this conference, which is intended to become a series with a two-year frequency. It attracted a large audience from the global hot atomic vapor community (280 registrations and up to 160 participating at any one time) and received excellent feedback from its visitors. The community was very grateful for this event, as there had been little opportunity to meet in this form since more than a year. Thus many new results were presented and the large diversity of research in the hot atomic vapor field became apparent.
macQsimal was represented prominently through several contributions, including presentations of Morgan Mitchell (ICFO), Philipp Treutlein (UNIBAS), Alice Sinatra (CNRS), Tilman Pfau (STUTT) and Christoph Affolderbach (UNINE).
In addition to the oral presentations the event included poster sessions on an innovative platform (wonder.me), which allowed the attendees to move an avatar through a virtual conference room, guiding it towards the different contributions or other avatars to visit a presentation or start a discussion.
As part of our effort in education and training, the event was rounded off by a tutorial lecture of macQsimal researcher Gaetano Mileti (UNINE) on the fundamentals of vapor cell atomic clocks and the measurement of time.
The recordings of the presentations, as well as the tutorial will become available online soon. Furthermore, as a follow-up of the conference a special issue of New Journal of Physics (NJP) is in preparation.