Quark Matter 2023

Taming a 400-Poster Programme with Offline-Ready Browsing

Quark Matter is the marquee conference of the heavy-ion physics community, covering quark-gluon plasma, collective flow, jet quenching, and related topics at RHIC and the LHC. The 2023 edition at the University of Houston drew about 1,000 physicists, making it one of the largest QM meetings in recent years. With six parallel tracks, seven days of talks, and more than 400 poster contributions, attendees needed a tool that could handle sheer volume.

Poster Browsing at Scale

Heavy-ion conferences are poster-intensive: at QM 2023, roughly two-thirds of accepted abstracts were assigned poster slots. HEPCon’s dedicated poster-browsing view let attendees filter by topic, keyword, or experiment (ALICE, STAR, CMS heavy-ion, etc.) and save individual posters to their favourites list. Several attendees told organisers they prepared their poster-session route on the bus ride to campus each morning.

Offline Access for a Spread-Out Campus

Sessions and poster halls were distributed across multiple buildings on the Houston campus, and cellular coverage varied. HEPCon’s PWA cached the full programme and all poster metadata on first load, so attendees could browse and search even when signal dropped. The offline capability was especially valued during the outdoor poster reception, where Wi-Fi was unavailable.

Favourites and Calendar Sync

With so many overlapping parallel sessions, QM attendees relied on the favourites feature to build a personal schedule. Calendar sync exported those favourites to their phone’s native calendar, so they received reminders for sessions they had flagged.