JAAS News

Award winner Rebeca Valledor with Prof. Nerea Bordel

The European Winter Conference is the traditional home of the Richard Payling Prize, which given to the best contribution on the topic of glow discharge spectrochemistry presented at that conference.  The 2011 award winner is Rebeca Valledor from the University of Oviedo, Spain.

Rebeca presented a poster entitled “Spatially and Temporally Resolved Studies of the Optical Emission in a Pulsed Radiofrequency Glow Discharge” (PC-052) in which she and her coworkers studied the temporal evolution of a pulsed RF glow discharge through spatially resolved spectroscopy, permitting them to deduce ionization and excitation mechanisms that are of critical importance in the design of a glow discharge source for mass spectrometry.

An advanced article just published online in JAAS (Valledor, R., Pisonero, J., Niels, T., and Bordel, N., “Spatial characterization of pressure-based plasma regimes in a radio frequency glow discharge by using optical emission spectroscopy“, Advance Article) provides a good preview of the work.

The award was sponsored by Horiba Jobin-Yvon, Spectruma Analytik GMbH, Tofwerk AG, Leco Inc., ThermoFischer, and nu Instruments.  Well done Rebeca!

In addition to a great scientific program, the European Winter Conference is known for its social aspects–and perhaps most prominent in this program is the ‘Hot Plasma Party‘ traditionally held on the eve of the first full day of the conference.  This year, the organizing committee took the conferees to the San Valero Winery outside of Zaragoza for dinner and dancing,  with the stipulation that the dress code include some red and black.  After a wonderful dinner, the organizing committee had a surprise planned: None other than Mr. Tom Jones!

Mr Sal Starr and Company entertain the conferees

Actually, this was Salvatore Starr–an ardent follower of Mr. Jones who sounds and looks a lot like Tom–and Salvatore puts on a show with just as much energy as Tom ever did.  You can tell from the pictures that a great deal of fun resulted.  I will not post any pictures that might embarrass anyone besides myself (and my good friend Jorge Pisonero).  Two things occur to me: First, somebody should setup a flickr account to share these photos- they are great; and second- somebody should organize something similar for the US and Asia-Pacific conferences.  These are too much fun!

Mr Jones?

Sal, Steve, and Jorge