Brief items

 It's been a busy week, so my apologies for the brevity, but here are a couple of interesting papers and sites that I stumbled upon:

• Back when I first started teaching about nanoscience, I said that you'd really know that semiconductor quantum dots had hit the big time when you occasionally saw tanker trucks full of them going down the highway.  I think we're basically there.  Here is a great review article that summarizes the present state of the art.
• Reaching back a month, I thought that this is an impressive piece of work.  They combine scanning tunneling microscopy, photoluminescence with a tunable optical source, and having the molecule sitting on a layer of NaCl to isolate it from the electronic continuum of the substrate.  The result is amazingly (to me) sharp spectral features in the emission, spatially resolved to the atomic scale.
• The emergence of python and the ability to embed it in web pages through notebooks has transformative educational potential, but it definitely requires a serious investment of time and effort.  Here is a fluid dynamics course from eight years ago that I found the other day - hey, it was new to me.
• For a more up-to-the-minute example, here is a new course about topology and condensed matter.  Now if I only had time to go through this.  The impending start of the new semester. 
• This preprint is also an important one.  There have been some major reports in the literature about quantum oscillations (e.g., resistivity or magnetization vs. magnetic field ) being observed in insulators.  This paper shows that one must be very careful, since the use of graphite gates can lead to a confounding effect that comes from those gates rather than the material under examination.
• This PNAS paper is a neat one.  It can be hard to grow epitaxial films of some "stubborn" materials, ones involving refractory metals (high melting points, very low vapor pressures, often vulnerable to oxidation).  This paper shows that instead one can use solid forms of precursor compounds containing those metals.  The compounds sublime with reasonably high vapor pressures, and if one can work out their decomposition properly, it's possible to grow nice films and multilayers of otherwise tough materials.  (I'd need to be convinced that the purity achieved from this comparatively low temperature approach is really good.)