Condensed Matter
drorzel | December 10, 2009Months ago, during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I offered to answer questions from people who donated to the Challenge. I then promptly forgot to respond to the questions sent in. Mea maxima culpa. Here's a way-too-late response to a good question from "tcmJOE":
I've spent the past few years trying to explore physics and figure out what I would be interested in doing--I've settled more towards energy research, somewhere between CM and MatSci, but I've tried at a variety of different things in the along the way. So my question for you is: How did you end up in AMO? Were there any other fields…
drorzel | October 15, 2009I was surprised to see Tom linking to a site claiming a superconductor at 254K. Not because the figure isn't newsworthy, but because somebody sent me this about a week ago, and I decided not to link to it. It's absolutely dripping with kook signifiers.
The two biggest things tripping my kook alarm are:
1) I've clicked around a bit, and there don't seem to be any links on the site to any external page. They have a whole set of claims of dramatic breakthroughs in the transition temperature for their superconducting materials, a new one every couple of months, but no links to research papers, or…
drorzel | July 29, 2009The Corporate Masters have launched a "featured blogger" program, asking individual ScienceBloggers to comment on news articles from the main site, and publishing the responses with the magazine piece. I just did one on new quantum experiments, which was posted today.
The news article is Supersizing Quantum Behavior by Veronique Greenwood. My piece is Reconciling an Ordinary World, which starts out:
One of the most vexing things about studying quantum mechanics is how maddeningly classical the world is. Quantum physics features all sorts of marvelous things--particles behaving like waves,…
drorzel | July 8, 2009There's a press release dated a week or two ago from Leiden University headlined "Physical reality of string theory demonstrated," in an apparent bid to make Peter Woit's head explode. The release itself is really pretty awful, with poorly explained and irrelevant pictures, and a really confusing description of what this is really about (in part because English was not the first language of the person writing it, I suspect). You have to go down to the third paragraph to find a sort-of explanation of what this is about:
Electrons can form a special kind of state, a so-called quantum critical…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Having repeatedly called for more popular-audience discussion of condensed matter physics (which is not my own field, but is the largest single division within the American Physical Society), I would be remiss if I failed to note a couple of really good efforts in this direction.
The first is last week's NOVA ScienceNOW segment on artificial diamonds and their technological potential. It's really cool to see time-lapse video of honkin' big diamonds being grown through chemical vapor deposition techniques.
The second is this New York Times piece on glass and the science of its use as a…
drorzel | June 23, 2009A wag of my finger at the Corporate Masters, for their new article about traffic jams, with the subhead "For particle physicists who study phase transitions, a traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars." In the body of the article, we find:
While the concept of critical density has been repeatedly demonstrated using computer simulations--drivers are surprisingly easy to model as a system of interacting particles--it wasn't until last year that this theory of traffic was experimentally confirmed. A team of physicists at Nagoya University wanted to see how many cars could maintain a…
drorzel | May 21, 2009Thursday at DAMOP was a little more broken up than usual for me at one of these meetings, because the nagging cold I have was bugging me more, and also because I needed to check my email a few times. There was still some neat stuff, though.
The early-morning session was the toughest call of the meeting: there was the undergraduate research session, a session on ultracold Rydberg atoms, and a session on complicated states in BEC, in widely spaced locations. I ended up skipping the undergraduate session in favor of hearing Chris Foot talk about a rotating optical lattice (which simulates some…
drorzel | May 21, 2009Technically, the meeting started Tuesday, but all that happened was a welcome reception, which I missed due to travel. The real beginning of the meeting was Wednesday morning, with the traditional unscheduled half-hour welcome from local dignitaries. That was followed by the Prize Session, featuring the frighteningly smart Misha Lukin, who was awarded the I.I. Rabi Prize for being really freaking brilliant. The abstract he sent in was kind of vague, but he mostly talked about stuff related to the quantum computing in diamond stuff that I've blogged about before.
I'm fighting a bit of a cold,…
drorzel | May 20, 2009I made it to Charlottesville, and am all checked in to the Econo Lodge, which is a little more Econo than I was expecting. It's an old-school motel, with rooms that open right into the parking lot, the sort of place where the towels are tiny and scratchy, the pillows and mattresses are thin, and the tap water tastes like cigarette smoke. Still, it's not like I'm going to be doing much more than sleeping here.
I promised some entertainment in my absence, so this seems like a good time for a Dorky Poll. I'm going to be spending a lot of time over the next few days listening to talks about the…
drorzel | May 4, 2009I'm an experimentalists through and through, and have always known better than to attempt real theory. On two occasions, though, I've been forced to do a little bit of computer simulation work in order to interpret my results. One of these was for the time-resolved collisions experiment, and worked out well. The other was when I was a post-doc, and was... less useful.
The situation we were dealing with in my post-doc work was a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium that we chopped into several pieces with an optical lattice. Whenever you do this, there is necessarily some uncertainty in the…