- Steve Simon at Oxford has put his graduate solid state course lectures online on youtube, linked from here. I'd previously linked to his undergrad solid state lectures. Good stuff, and often containing fun historical anecdotes that I hadn't known before.
- Nature last week had this paper demonstrating operations of Si quantum dot-based qubits at 1.5 K with some decent fidelity. Neat, showing that long electron spin coherence times are indeed realizable in these structures at comparatively torrid conditions.
- Speaking of quantum computing, it was reported that John Martinis is stepping down as lead of google's superconducting quantum computation effort (these folks). I've always thought of him as an absolutely fearless experimentalist, and while no one is indispensable, his departure leads me to lower my expectations about google's progress. Update: Forbes has a detailed interview with Martinis about this. It's a very interesting inside look.
- I'd never heard of "the Poynting effect" before, and I thought this write-up was very nice.
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Brief items
A few more links to help fill the time:
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7 comments:
I suspect you mean "torrid" (hot and dry) rather than "torpid" (lethargic), but maybe I'm missing something.
Fixed, thanks. Autocorrect....
I'm surprised to see Google letting John resign like that, must have been a fundamental disagreement about the future of QC at Google. Makes me slightly worry about the direction QC is going to take in the future in industry.
Anon, it could also be a clash of personalities or management styles. No idea.
Idle pseudonymous speculation: Senior management tried to do something dumb like outsource hardware development to scale up long before it was ready and/or go fully into stealth mode. Martinis realized life's too short to waste trying to teach a software/internet firm how to do hardware and decided to go back to ucsb or join ibm and wait for last word on Nobel tour?
Re Martinis, I've updated the post to link to the interview in Forbes that just came out. Definite differences in management approach. (I can imagine his frustration at having his view on a wiring approach being ignored if he is supposed to be head of hardware.)
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