APS Global Physics Summit 2025 promises record-breaking experience for attendees

In March, the city of Anaheim, California, will host the largest gathering of physicists the world has ever seen. Coming on the heels of APS’ 125th anniversary, the Society will bring its two hallmark gatherings together in a Joint March Meeting and April Meeting for the first time since 1999, when 11,000 physicists from around the world gathered in Atlanta to celebrate APS’ centennial.

This year’s event, dubbed the APS Global Physics Summit 2025, expects more than 15,000 attendees across all areas of the discipline — record attendance for an event with record numbers of abstract submissions and exhibitors. “It will be great to have all of physics come together in one place,” says March Meeting Chair Kenneth Brown.

Brown, a physicist at Duke University, is the meeting’s first-ever chair from the Division of Quantum Information. A lucky coincidence, he says, given that 2025 is also the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

“There are a bunch of APS units that don’t clearly fit into the March or April Meeting,” says David Garfinkle, chair of April Meeting. “In this year’s format, they won’t have to decide which meeting to go to.”

Garfinkle, a physicist at Oakland University, says attendees should think of the Global Physics Summit as “adjacent meetings with lots of crossover.” The typical March Meeting sessions and exhibitor hall will all be in the Anaheim Convention Center; just next door, in the Anaheim Marriott hotel, April Meeting attendees will find their usual scientific tracks. And for the first time, the ‘splashy’ physics types — soft matter physicists and those who study living systems and polymers — will have a breakout meeting in the Hilton Anaheim.

“The idea is that everybody should be able to go to any session,” says Garfinkle. “It will be very easy for people to go back and forth” between the meeting’s three ‘campuses.’

Brown is excited for all the scientific sessions that the Joint March Meeting and April Meeting will offer. “There are a bunch of sessions that wouldn’t have been possible without having the two meeting committees working together,” he says.

For example, the Division of Quantum Information partnered with the Division of Nuclear Physics to plan multiple sessions, like “Radiation Effects on Superconducting Qubits and Sensors.” And the Division of Particles and Fields collaborated with the Division of Computational Physics to deliver a session called “Electronic Structure Theory for Dark Matter Detection.”

The summit will also offer a Quantum Festival to celebrate the 2025 International Year of Quantum, established by the United Nations last summer. The festival will kick off with a public-friendly Quantum Jubilee on Saturday, March 15, at the City National Grove of Anaheim with two performances, “Tinguely Entangled” and “Quantum Voyages,” and science demonstrations, circus performers, and talks by at least one Nobel laureate and a NASA astronaut. Themes will span the quantum wonders from the subatomic to the cosmic, with QuantumFest continuing all week long.

Some of the summit’s features will be familiar events for March Meeting attendees, but novel highlights for April Meeting attendees, says Garfinkle. For example, the “Special Session with Nobel Laureates” will feature recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. And childcare will now be available to every attendee. “I think this will really help a lot of our early-career physicists,” says Garfinkle.

By combining the “Kavli Foundation Special Symposium” — typical of the March Meeting — with the plenary style of the April Meeting, the summit will offer two avenues into cutting-edge physics. “Exploring the Cosmos” on Wednesday, March 19, will feature physicists Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, Sarah Vigeland, and Suzanne Staggs, who will share the latest from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the NANOGrav Pulsar Timing Array, and the Simons Observatory, under construction in the Atacama Desert of Chile — the world’s highest telescope at an elevation of over 17,000 feet.

For “It’s a Quantum World” on Thursday, March 20, which Brown named in a nod to Disney’s “It’s a Small World” ride in the nearby Magic Kingdom, attendees can expect talks that highlight “how all the different parts of physics are touched by quantum mechanics.” Brown is excited for attendees to hear from physicist Ekkehard Peik, famous for unlocking the physics needed to drive the world’s first nuclear clock.

Attendees can also catch the public lecture by Katherine Freese of University of Texas at Austin, who will be speaking about dark matter — still undetected, but theorized to be the gravitational glue holding together galaxies. “She’s really good at connecting with audiences,” Garfinkle says.

With so many special events and activities, and more invited sessions — “the heart and soul of the meeting” — than ever before, Garfinkle says he expects some may find it hard to choose. “It all looks great to me.”