APS March Meeting

No cond-mat update this week. I just returned from the March Meeting of the American Physical Society, that annual opportunity to get together with 7000 of my closest condensed matter physics colleagues and stay in over-priced hotels with malfunctioning wireless internet access. The meeting was good - I'll mention just a few observations:

• There was a particularly nice session on the recent transport experiments in graphene that I've mentioned in previous posts. The talks were interesting, and there were rumors of cool new data not yet in print (i.e. observation of the quantum Hall effect in graphene at room temperature (!!) and 30 Tesla).
• There was an invited session on topological quantum computation with a couple of talks that were almost utterly incomprehensible to the nonspecialist.
• The fire marshals kicked a bunch of people out of a ridiculously small room housing a single-molecule electronics talk, and closed the door right in the face of a Nobel laureate, who took that with good grace.
• Speaking of single-molecule devices, there continues to be lots of interest and lots of effort in that area - a very exciting topic I should write more about later.
• Apparently, if you're a big enough name in a given field, you can coin new vocabulary and assume that everyone will figure out what you mean.

I'll write more about some science later.