This continues to be a very busy time, but I wanted to point out two preprints that caught my eye this week. Their subjects are completely disparate, but they stand out as essentially reviews written in a much more conversational tone than the usual literature.
The first is this preprint about chirality-induced spin selectivity, a subject that I've mentioned before on this blog. There is now an extensive body of evidence (of varying quality) that there is a connection between structural chirality of molecules and their interactions with the spin angular momentum of electrons. This includes monolayers of chiral molecules leading to net spin polarization of photoemitted electrons (here), a lot of electronic transport experiments involving chiral molecules and magnetic electrodes that seem to show spin-dependent transmission that is absent with achiral molecules, and even a chirality dependence of molecular adsorption kinetics on magnetic surfaces (here). The preprint is a provocative discussion of the topic and possible mechanisms, and the importance of precision in the description of the various phenomena.
On a completely different topic, this preprint is a fun discussion about quantum gravity (!) and how condensed matter ideas of "the vacuum" can lead to insights about how quantum mechanics and gravity might need to play together. One fun bit early on is a discussion of something I like to point out to my undergrad stat mech students: A single hydrogen atom in a very very large box will apparently (if the usual stat mech formalism of partition functions is valid) be spontaneously ionized, even when the box and atom are at temperatures faaaaaar below the energy scale for ionization. This is discussed nicely in this 1966 article in the Journal of Chemical Education. Anyway, I thought this was an interesting discussion from three condensed matter theorists.
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