In this week, I participated in two different conferences, both of which were held online.

The first conference that I joined was Young Research Leaders Group Workshop organized by Alexander Mook and Helena Reichlova through SPICE in JGU Mainz. The idea was to bring junior researchers over the world in one place to share ideas on spin trasnport. Although each speaker was given only 10 mins for presentation, we had plenty of time to ask questions and discuss in “speaker rooms”. I really liked the idea and it almost felt like a real conference to me. There were very interesting talks. There were many talks on antiferromagnets and thermal spin transport, as well as spin-orbitronics talks (like spin-orbit torques, topological spin textures, etc.). Because I am personally quite interetsed in this topics, I enjoeyd most of the talks and tried to participate as many discussion sessions as possible. The organizers are planning to hold the same conference in the next year again, in offline. I really hope it happens!

The second conference was Korean Physical Society Autumn Meeting, a regular conference happening in every 6 months in Korea. This year, there was a focus session on “Theoretical progress in spin-orbitronics“, and I gave an invited talk with a title “Orbitronics from first-principles”. As Korean spintronics community is rather small and we already know each other pretty well, the session was quite relaxing atmosphere in which several minutes of delay was not a problem at all and everyone asked questions rather freely. Also, it was nice to see my colleageus in Korea as well, whom I got to know during my PhD. I feel like Korean spintronics community has more interest in my topic of research, orbitronics, compared to European spintronics community, seeing questions that people ask. I hope I can trigger more interst from European researchers in orbitronics while I am here.

After spending a busy week with conferences, I plan to have a rather peaceful weekend. But as I got to know many interesting papers during the conference week, I may spend some time reading these papers.