Time for blogging has continued to be scarce, but here are a few papers to distract (and for readers who are US citizens: vote if you have not already done so!).
- Reaching back, this preprint by Aharonov, Collins, Popescu talks about a thought experiment in which angular momentum can seemingly be transferred from one region to another even though the probability of detecting spin-carrying particles between the two regions can be made arbitrarily low. I've always found these kinds of discussions to be fun, even when the upshot for me is usually, "I must not really understand the subtleties of weak measurements in quantum mechanics." This is a specific development based on the quantum Cheshire cat idea. I know enough to understand that when one is talking about post-selection in quantum experiments, some questions are just not well-posed. If we send a wavepacked of photons at a barrier, and we detect with a click a photon that (if it was in the middle of the incident wavepacket) seems to have therefore traversed the barrier faster than c, that doesn't mean much, since the italicized parenthetical clause above is uncheckable in principle.
- Much more recently, this paper out last week in Nature reports the observation of superconductivity below 200 mK in a twisted bilayer of WSe2. I believe that this is the first observation of superconductivity in a twisted bilayer of an otherwise nonsuperconducting 2D semiconductor other than graphene. As in the graphene case, the superconductivity shows up at a particular filling of the moiré lattice, and interestingly seems to happen around zero applied vertical electric field (displacement field) in the device. I don't have much to say here beyond that it's good to see interesting results in a broader class of materials - that suggests that there is a more general principle at work than "graphene is special".
- This preprint from last week from Klein et al. is pretty impressive. It's been known for over 25 years (see here) that it is possible to use a single-electron transistor (SET) as a scannable charge sensor and potentiometer. Historically, making these devices and operating them has been a real art. They are fragile, static-sensitive, and fabricating them from evaporated metal on the tips of drawn optical fibers is touchy. There have been advances in recent years from multiple quarters, and this paper demonstrates a particularly interesting idea: Use a single charge trap in a layer of WSe2 as the SET, and effectively put the sample of interest on the scannable tip. This is an outgrowth of the quantum twisting microscope.
