nanoscale views
Anyons, simulation, and "real" systems
Quanta magazine this week published an article about two very recent papers, in which different...
3 weeks ago
Quanta magazine this week published an article about two very recent papers, in which different groups performed quantum simulations of anyons, objects that do not follow Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac statistics when they are exchanged. For so-called Abelian anyons (which I wrote...
nanoscale views
What is a glass?
I want to write about a recently published paper, but to do so on an accessible level, I should...
2 weeks ago
I want to write about a recently published paper, but to do so on an accessible level, I should really lay some ground work first.
At the primary school level, typically people are taught that there are three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. (Plasma may be introduced...
nanoscale views
Chemical potential and banana waffles
The concept of chemical potential is one that seems almost deliberately obscure to many. I’ve...
a month ago
The concept of chemical potential is one that seems almost deliberately obscure to many. I’ve written about this here, and referenced this article. What you may not realize is that the chemical potential, of water in particular, plays a crucial role in why my banana waffle...
nanoscale views
The problems and opportunities of data
We live in a world of "big data", and this presents a number of challenges for how we handle this at...
2 months ago
We live in a world of "big data", and this presents a number of challenges for how we handle this at research universities. Until relatively recently, the domain of huge volume/huge throughput scientific data was chiefly that of the nuclear/particle physics community and then...
nanoscale views
Recent RT superconductivity claim - summary page
In the interests of saving people from lots of googling or scrolling through 170+ comments, here is...
2 months ago
In the interests of saving people from lots of googling or scrolling through 170+ comments, here is a bulleted summary of links relevant to the recent claim of room temperature superconductivity in a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride compound under pressure.
Dias's contributed...
nanoscale views
Michio Kaku and science popularization in the Age of Shamelessness
In some ways, we live in a golden age of science popularization. There are fantastic publications...
a month ago
In some ways, we live in a golden age of science popularization. There are fantastic publications like Quanta doing tremendous work; platforms like YouTube and podcasts have made it possible for both practicing scientists and science communicators to reach enormous audiences;...
nanoscale views
What is a spin glass?
As mentioned previously, structural glasses are materials in which there is no periodic lattice (no...
5 days ago
As mentioned previously, structural glasses are materials in which there is no periodic lattice (no long-range spatial order) and the building blocks get "stuck" in some configuration, kinetically unable to get to the true energetic minimum state which would almost certainly be a...
nanoscale views
Tour de force work: Bragg, diffraction, and diamond
There are some examples of scientific progress that just seem so far above and beyond the norm, it's...
3 months ago
There are some examples of scientific progress that just seem so far above and beyond the norm, it's almost jaw dropping in terms of the mental leap needed for the insight. One example that I always liked to point out to first-year undergrads learning about gravity is Johannes...
nanoscale views
Brief items
With the end of the semester approaching and various grant deadlines, it's been a very busy time. ...
a month ago
With the end of the semester approaching and various grant deadlines, it's been a very busy time. Here are some items I spotted this week (some new, some old):
This article from Quanta about the "Einstein tile" is great - I particularly like the animated illustration. This...
nanoscale views
APS March Meeting 2023, Day 1
Ahh, Las Vegas. I will say, I think every APS March Meeting from now on should have a giant Ferris...
3 months ago
Ahh, Las Vegas. I will say, I think every APS March Meeting from now on should have a giant Ferris wheel right by the registration lobby.
Here are a few highlights from what I saw after I arrived around lunchtime today:
Given some of my current research, I spent a fair bit...
nanoscale views
The wormhole kerfuffle, ER=EPR, and all that
I was busy trying to finish off a grant proposal and paper revisions this week and didn't have the...
6 months ago
I was busy trying to finish off a grant proposal and paper revisions this week and didn't have the time to react in realtime to the PR onslaught surrounding the recent Nature paper by a team from Harvard, MIT, Fermilab, and Google. There are many places to get caught up on this,...
nanoscale views
Science and how it will be practiced in the future
I just registered for an event that celebrates the 35th anniversary of a particular science and...
3 months ago
I just registered for an event that celebrates the 35th anniversary of a particular science and engineering program, and one question they posed was, to paraphrase, "Science has changed a lot in the last 35 years. Please make three predictions about science in the next 35...
nanoscale views
Bob Curl - it is possible to be successful and also a good person
I went to a memorial service today at Rice for my late colleague Bob Curl, who died this past...
6 months ago
I went to a memorial service today at Rice for my late colleague Bob Curl, who died this past summer, and it was a really nice event. I met Bob almost immediately upon my arrival at Rice back in 2000 (though I’d heard about him from my thesis advisor, who’d met him at the Nobel...
nanoscale views
What do we want in a conference venue?
The APS March Meeting was in Las Vegas this year, and I have yet to talk to a single attendee who...
2 months ago
The APS March Meeting was in Las Vegas this year, and I have yet to talk to a single attendee who liked that decision in hindsight. In brief, the conference venue seemed about 10% too small (severe crowding issues in hallways between sessions); while the APS deal on hotels was...
nanoscale views
APS March Meeting 2023 - coming soon
I will be attending the 2023 APS March Meeting in Las Vegas this week. I will do my best to try to...
3 months ago
I will be attending the 2023 APS March Meeting in Las Vegas this week. I will do my best to try to report on some highlights daily, though that may be more challenging than usual for me this time around (looming proposal deadline that I suspect all of my condensed matter faculty...
nanoscale views
Some interesting links - useful lecture notes, videos
Proposal writing, paper writing, and course prep are eating a lot of my bandwidth right now, but I...
4 months ago
Proposal writing, paper writing, and course prep are eating a lot of my bandwidth right now, but I wanted to share a few things:
David Tong at Cambridge is a gifted educator and communicator who has written lecture notes that span a wide swath of the physics curriculum, from...
nanoscale views
Cavities and tuning physics
I've written before about cavity quantum electrodynamics. An electromagnetic cavity - a resonator...
4 months ago
I've written before about cavity quantum electrodynamics. An electromagnetic cavity - a resonator of some kind, like your microwave oven chamber is for microwaves, or like an optical cavity made using nearly perfect mirrors - picks out what electromagnetic modes are allowed...
nanoscale views
Condensed matter’s rough start
I’m teaching undergrad solid-state for the first time, and it has served as a reminder of how...
4 months ago
I’m teaching undergrad solid-state for the first time, and it has served as a reminder of how condensed matter physics got off the ground. I suspect that one reason CM historically had not received a lot of respect in the early years (e.g. Pauli declaring that solid-state...
nanoscale views
The 2022 Welch Conference
The last couple of weeks have been very full.
One event was the annual Welch Foundation conference...
7 months ago
The last couple of weeks have been very full.
One event was the annual Welch Foundation conference (program here). The program chair for this one was W. E. Moerner, expert (and Nobel Laureate) on single-molecule spectroscopy, and it was really a great meeting. I'm not just...
nanoscale views
APS March Meeting 2023, Day 4 + wrapup
My last day at the March Meeting was a bit scattershot, but here are a few highlights:
In a...
2 months ago
My last day at the March Meeting was a bit scattershot, but here are a few highlights:
In a session about spin transport, the opening invited talk by Jiaming He was a clear discussion of recent experimental results on spin Seebeck effects in the magnetic insulator LuFeO3. The...
nanoscale views
Materials labs of the future + cost
The NSF Division of Materials Research has been soliciting input from the community about both the...
7 months ago
The NSF Division of Materials Research has been soliciting input from the community about both the biggest outstanding problems in condensed matter and materials science, and the future of materials labs - what kind of infrastructure, training, etc. will be needed to address...
nanoscale views
Favorite science fiction invention?
In the forward-looking spirit of the New Year, it might be fun to get readers’ opinions of their...
5 months ago
In the forward-looking spirit of the New Year, it might be fun to get readers’ opinions of their favorite science fiction inventions. I wrote about favorite sci-fi materials back in 2015, but let’s broaden the field. Personally, I’m a fan of the farcaster (spoiler warning!) from...
nanoscale views
Brief items - LOC, GPT, etc.
This year was a busy one and my overall posting rate is down. Hopefully the coming year will be a...
5 months ago
This year was a busy one and my overall posting rate is down. Hopefully the coming year will be a bit less frenetic, but who knows. A few brief items:
First, in the odd self-promotion department, this blog is officially going to be indexed by the Library of Congress as part...
nanoscale views
The difficult need for creativity on demand
Thoughts at the end of another busy year…. Good science is a creative enterprise. Some stereotypes...
5 months ago
Thoughts at the end of another busy year…. Good science is a creative enterprise. Some stereotypes paint most scientists as toiling away, so deeply constrained by logic that they function more like automatons grinding out the next incremental advance in a steady if slow march of...
nanoscale views
The fusion story of the day
There is a press conference going on right now announcing a breakthrough at the National Ignition...
5 months ago
There is a press conference going on right now announcing a breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility at Livermore. The NIF is an inertial confinement fusion facility that uses 192 laser beams to compress a fuel pellet containing deuterium and tritium. The pellet is...
nanoscale views
The need for energy-efficient computing
Computing is consuming a large and ever-growing
fraction of the world's energy capacity.
I've seen...
6 months ago
Computing is consuming a large and ever-growing
fraction of the world's energy capacity.
I've seen the essential data in this figure several times over the last few months, and it has convinced me that the need for energy-efficient computing hardware is genuinely pressing. This...
nanoscale views
APS March Meeting 2023, Day 2
I ended up spending more time catching up with people this afternoon than going to talks after my...
3 months ago
I ended up spending more time catching up with people this afternoon than going to talks after my session ended, but here are a couple of highlights:
There was an invited session about the metal halide perovskites, and there were some interesting talks. My faculty colleague...
nanoscale views
Rice University Academy of Fellows postdoc opportunity, 2023
As I have posted in previous years, Rice has a university-wide endowed honorific postdoctoral...
7 months ago
As I have posted in previous years, Rice has a university-wide endowed honorific postdoctoral program called the Rice Academy of Fellows. Like all such things, it's very competitive. The new application listing has gone live here with a deadline of January 4, 2023. ...
nanoscale views
Getting light out of plasmonic tunnel junctions - the sequel
A couple of years ago I wrote about our work on "above threshold" light emission in planar metal...
8 months ago
A couple of years ago I wrote about our work on "above threshold" light emission in planar metal tunnel junctions. In that work, we showed that in a planar tunnel junction, you can apply a bias voltage \(V\) and get lots of photons out at energies quite a bit greater than...
nanoscale views
News items for the new year
After I was not chosen to be Speaker of the US House of Representatives, I think it’s time to...
4 months ago
After I was not chosen to be Speaker of the US House of Representatives, I think it’s time to highlight some brief items:
Here is a great blog post by a Rice grad alum, Daniel Gonzales, about flow to approach faculty searches. I had written a fair bit on this a number of years...
nanoscale views
APS March Meeting 2023, Day 3
There is vigorous discussion taking place on the Day 2 link regarding the highly controversial claim...
2 months ago
There is vigorous discussion taking place on the Day 2 link regarding the highly controversial claim of room temperature superconductivity.
Highlights from Wednesday are a hodgepodge because of my meanderings:
The session about quantum computing hardware was well attended,...
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