Brief items - fresh perspectives, some news bits

As usual, I hope to write more about particular physics topics soon, but in the meantime I wanted to share a sampling of news items:

• First, it's a pleasure to see new long-form writing about condensed matter subjects, in an era where science blogging has unquestionably shrunk compared to its heyday.  The new Quantum Matters substack by Justin Wilson (and William Shelton) looks like it will be a fun place to visit often.
• Similar in spirit, I've also just learned about the Knowmads podcast (here on youtube), put out by Prachi Garella and Bhavay Tyagi, two doctoral students at the University of Houston.  Fun Interviews with interesting scientists about their science and how they get it done.  
• There have been some additional news bits relevant to the present research funding/university-govt relations mess.  Earlier this week, 200 business leaders published an open letter about how the slashing support for university research will seriously harm US economic competitiveness.  More of this, please.  I continue to be surprised by how quiet technology-related, pharma, and finance companies are being, at least in public.  Crushing US science and engineering university research will lead to serious personnel and IP shortages down the line, definitely poor for US standing.  Again, now is the time to push back on legislators about cuts mooted in the presidential budget request.  
• The would-be 15% indirect cost rate at NSF has been found to be illegal, in a summary court judgment released yesterday.  (Brief article here, pdf of the ruling here.)
• Along these lines, there are continued efforts for proposals about how to reform/alter indirect cost rates in a far less draconian manner.  These are backed by collective organizations like the AAU and COGR.  If you're interested in this, please go here, read the ideas, and give some feedback.  (Note for future reference:  the Joint Associations Group (JAG) may want to re-think their acronym.  In local slang where I grew up, the word "jag" does not have pleasant connotations.)
• The punitive attempt to prevent Harvard from taking international students has also been stopped for now in the courts. 

So you want to build a science/engineering laboratory building

A very quick summary of some non-negative news developments:

• The NSF awarded 500 more graduate fellowships this week, bringing the total for this year up to 1500.  (Apologies for the X link.)  This is still 25% lower than last year's number, and of course far below the original CHIPS and Science act target of 3000, but it's better than the alternative.  I think we can now all agree that the supposed large-scale bipartisan support for the CHIPS and Science act was illusory.
• There seems to be some initial signs of pushback on the senate side regarding the proposed massive science funding cuts.  Again, now is the time to make views known to legislators - I am told by multiple people with experience in this arena that it really can matter.
• There was a statement earlier this week that apparently the US won't be going after Chinese student visas.  This would carry more weight if it didn't look like US leadership was wandering ergodically through all possible things to say with no actual plan or memory.

On to the main topic of this post.  Thanks to my professional age (older than dirt) and my experience (overseeing shared research infrastructure; being involved in a couple of building design and construction projects; and working on PI lab designs and build-outs), I have some key advice and lessons learned for anyone designing a new big science/engineering research building.  This list is by no means complete, and I invite readers to add their insights in the comments.  While it seems likely that many universities will be curtailing big capital construction projects in the near term because of financial uncertainty, I hope this may still come in handy to someone.  

• Any big laboratory building should have a dedicated loading dock with central receiving.  If you're spending $100M-200M on a building, this is not something that you should "value engineer" away.  The long term goal is a building that operates well for the PIs and is easy to maintain, and you're going to need to be able to bring in big crates for lab and service equipment.  You should have a freight elevator adjacent to the dock.  
• You should also think hard about what kind of equipment will have to be moved in and out of the building when designing hallways, floor layouts, and door widths.  You don't want to have to take out walls, doorframes, or windows, or to need a crane to hoist equipment into upper floors because it can't get around corners.
• Think hard about process gasses and storage tanks at the beginning.  Will PIs need to have gas cylinders and liquid nitrogen and argon tanks brought in and out in high volumes all the time, with all the attendant safety concerns?  Would you be better off getting LN2 or LAr tanks even though campus architects will say they are unsightly?  
• Likewise, consider whether you should have building-wide service for "lab vacuum", N2 gas, compressed air, DI water, etc.  If not and PIs have those needs, you should plan ahead to deal with this.
• Gas cylinder and chemical storage - do you have enough on-site storage space for empty cylinders and back-up supply cylinders?  If this is a very chemistry-heavy building, think hard about safety and storing solvents. 
• Make sure you design for adequate exhaust capacity for fume hoods.  Someone will always want to add more hoods.  While all things are possible with huge expenditures, it's better to make sure you have capacity to spare, because adding hoods beyond the initial capacity would likely require a huge redo of the building HVAC systems.
• Speaking of HVAC, think really hard about controls and monitoring.  Are you going to have labs that need tight requirements on temperature and humidity?  When you set these up, put have enough sensors of the right types in the right places, and make sure that your system is designed to work even when the outside air conditions are at their seasonal extremes (hot and humid in the summer, cold and dry in the winter).  Also, consider having a vestibule (air lock) for the main building entrance - you'd rather not scoop a bunch of hot, humid air (or freezing, super-dry air) into the building every time a student opens the door.
• Still on HVAC, make sure that power outages and restarts don't lead to weird situations like having the whole building at negative pressure relative to the outside, or duct work bulging or collapsing.
• Still on HVAC, actually think about where the condensate drains for the fan units will overflow if they get plugged up or overwhelmed.  You really don't want water spilling all over a rack of networking equipment in an IT closet.  Trust me.
• Chilled water:  Whether it's the process chilled water for the air conditioning, or the secondary chilled water for lab equipment, make sure that the loop is built correctly.   Incompatible metals (e.g., some genius throws in a cast iron fitting somewhere, or joints between dissimilar metals) can lead to years and years of problems down the line.  Make sure lines are flushed and monitored for cleanliness, and have filters in each lab that can be checked and maintained easily.
• Electrical - design with future needs in mind.  If possible, it's a good idea to have PI labs with their own isolation transformers, to try to mitigate inter-lab electrical noise issues.  Make sure your electrical contractors understand the idea of having "clean" vs. "dirty" power and can set up the grounding accordingly while still being in code.
• Still on electrical, consider building-wide surge protection, and think about emergency power capacity.  For those who don't know, emergency power is usually a motor-generator that kicks in after a few seconds to make sure that emergency lighting and critical systems (including lab exhaust) keep going.
• Ceiling heights, duct work, etc. - It's not unusual for some PIs to have tall pieces of equipment.  Think about how you will accommodate these.  Pits in the floors of basement labs?  5 meter slab-to-slab spacing?  Think also about how ductwork and conduits are routed.  You don't want someone to tell you that installation of a new apparatus is going to cost a bonus $100K because shifting a duct sideways by half a meter will require a complete HVAC redesign.
• Think about the balance between lab space and office space/student seating.  No one likes giant cubicle farm student seating, but it does have capacity.  In these days of zoom and remote access to experiments, the way students and postdocs use offices is evolving, which makes planning difficult.  Health and safety folks would definitely prefer not to have personnel effectively headquartered directly in lab spaces.  Seriously, though, when programming a building, you need to think about how many people per PI lab space will need places to sit.  I have yet to see a building initially designed with enough seating to handle all the personnel needs if every PI lab were fully occupied and at a high level of research activity. 
• Think about maintenance down the line.  Every major building system has some lifespan.  If a big air handler fails, is it accessible and serviceable, or would that require taking out walls or cutting equipment into pieces and disrupting the entire building?  Do you want to set up a situation where you may have to do this every decade?  (Asking for a friend.)
• Entering the realm of fantasy, use your vast power and influence to get your organization to emphasize preventative maintenance at an appropriate level, consistently over the years.  Universities (and national labs and industrial labs) love "deferred maintenance" because kicking the can down the road can make a possible cost issue now into someone else's problem later.  Saving money in the short term can be very tempting.  It's also often easier and more glamorous to raise money for the new J. Smith Laboratory for Physical Sciences than it is to raise money to replace the HVAC system in the old D. Jones Engineering Building.  Avoid this temptation, or one day (inevitably when times are tight) your university will notice that it has $300M in deferred maintenance needs.

I may update this list as more items occur to me, but please feel free to add input/ideas.

A precision measurement science mystery - new physics or incomplete calculations?

Again, as a distraction from persistently concerning news, here is a science mystery of which I was previously unaware.

The role of approximations in physics is something that very often comes as a shock to new students.  There is this cultural expectation out there that because physics is all about quantitative understanding of physical phenomena, and the typical way we teach math and science in K12 education, we should be able to get exact solutions to many of our attempts to model nature mathematically.   In practice, though, constructing physics theories is almost always about approximations, either in the formulation of the model itself (e.g. let's consider the motion of an electron about the proton in the hydrogen atom by treating the proton as infinitely massive and of negligible size) or in solving the mathematics (e.g., we can't write an exact analytical solution of the problem when including relativity, but we can do an order-by-order expansion in powers of \(p/mc\)).  Theorists have a very clear understanding of what means to say that an approximation is "well controlled" - you know on both physical and mathematical grounds that a series expansion actually converges, for example.  

Some problems are simpler than others, just by virtue of having a very limited number of particles and degrees of freedom, and some problems also lend themselves to high precision measurements.  The hydrogen atom problem is an example of both features.  Just two spin-1/2 particles (if we approximate the proton as a lumped object) and readily accessible to optical spectroscopy to measure the energy levels for comparison with theory.  We can do perturbative treatments to account for other effects of relativity, spin-orbit coupling, interactions with nuclear spin, and quantum electrodynamic corrections (here and here).  A hallmark of atomic physics is the remarkable precision and accuracy of these calculations when compared with experiment.  (The \(g\)-factor of the electron is experimentally known to a part in \(10^{10}\) and matches calculations out to fifth order in \(\alpha = e^2/(4 \pi \epsilon_{0}\hbar c)\).).  

The helium atom is a bit more complicated, having two electrons and a more complicated nucleus, but over the last hundred years we've learned a lot about how to do both calculations and spectroscopy.   As explained here, there is a problem.  It is possible to put helium into an excited metastable triplet state with one electron in the \(1s\) orbital, the other electron in the \(2s\) orbital, and their spins in a triplet configuration.  Then one can measure the ionization energy of that system - the minimum energy required to kick an electron out of the atom and off to infinity.  This energy can be calculated to seventh order in \(\alpha\), and the theorists think that they're accounting for everything, including the finite (but tiny) size of the nucleus.  The issue:  The calculation and the experiment differ by about 2 nano-eV.  That may not sound like a big deal, but the experimental uncertainty is supposed to be a little over 0.08 nano-eV, and the uncertainty in the calculation is estimated to be 0.4 nano-eV.  This works out to something like a 9\(\sigma\) discrepancy.  Most recently, a quantitatively very similar discrepancy shows up in the case of measurements performed in 3He rather than 4He.  

This is pretty weird.  Historically, it would seem that the most likely answer is a problem with either the measurements (though that seems doubtful, since precision spectroscopy is such a well-developed set of techniques), the calculation (though that also seems weird, since the relevant physics seems well known), or both.  The exciting possibility is that somehow there is new physics at work that we don't understand, but that's a long shot.  Still, something fun to consider (as my colleagues (and I) try to push back on the dismantling of US scientific research.)

Pushing back on US science cuts: Now is a critical time

Every week has brought more news about actions that, either as a collateral effect or a deliberate goal, will deeply damage science and engineering research in the US.  Put aside for a moment the tremendously important issue of student visas (where there seems to be a policy of strategic vagueness, to maximize the implicit threat that there may be selective actions).  Put aside the statement from a Justice Department official that there is a general plan is to "bring these universities to their knees", on the pretext that this is somehow about civil rights.  

The detailed version of the presidential budget request for FY26 is now out (pdf here for the NSF portion).  If enacted, it would be deeply damaging to science and engineering research in the US and the pipeline of trained students who support the technology sector.  Taking NSF first:  The topline NSF budget would be cut from $8.34B to $3.28B.  Engineering would be cut by 75%, Math and Physical Science by 66.8%.  The anticipated agency-wide success rate for grants would nominally drop below 7%, though that is misleading (basically taking the present average success rate and cutting it by 2/3, while some programs are already more competitive than others.).  In practice, many programs already have future-year obligations, and any remaining funds will have to go there, meaning that many programs would likely have no awards at all in the coming fiscal year.  The NSF's CAREER program (that agency's flagship young investigator program) would go away  This plan would also close one of the LIGO observatories (see previous link).  (This would be an extra bonus level of stupid, since LIGO's ability to do science relies on having two facilities, to avoid false positives and to identify event locations in the sky.  You might as well say that you'll keep an accelerator running but not the detector.)  Here is the table that I think hits hardest, dollars aside:

The number of people involved in NSF activities would drop by 240,000.  The graduate research fellowship program would be cut by more than half.  The NSF research training grant program (another vector for grad fellowships) would be eliminated.  

The situation at NIH and NASA is at least as bleak.  See here for a discussion from Joshua Weitz at Maryland which includes this plot: 

This proposed dismantling of US research and especially the pipeline of students who support the technology sector (including medical research, computer science, AI, the semiconductor industry, chemistry and chemical engineering, the energy industry) is astonishing in absolute terms.  It also does not square with the claim of some of our elected officials and high tech CEOs to worry about US competitiveness in science and engineering.  (These proposed cuts are not about fiscal responsibility; just the amount added in the proposed DOD budget dwarfs these cuts by more than a factor of 3.)

If you are a US citizen and think this is the wrong direction, now is the time to talk to your representatives in Congress. In the past, Congress has ignored presidential budget requests for big cuts.  The American Physical Society, for example, has tools to help with this.  Contacting legislators by phone is also made easy these days.  From the standpoint of public outreach, Cornell has an effort backing large-scale writing of editorials and letters to the editor.

Quick survey - machine shops and maker spaces

Recent events are very dire for research at US universities, and I will write further about those, but first a quick unrelated survey for those at such institutions.  Back in the day, it was common for physics and some other (mechanical engineering?) departments to have machine shops with professional staff.  In the last 15-20 years, there has been a huge growth in maker-spaces on campuses to modernize and augment those capabilities, though often maker-spaces are aimed at undergraduate design courses rather than doing work to support sponsored research projects (and grad students, postdocs, etc.).  At the same time, it is now easier than ever (modulo tariffs) to upload CAD drawings to a website and get a shop in another country to ship finished parts to you.

Quick questions:   Does your university have a traditional or maker-space-augmented machine shop available to support sponsored research?  If so, who administers this - a department, a college/school, the office of research?  Does the shop charge competitive rates relative to outside vendors?  Are grad students trained to do work themselves, and are there professional machinists - how does that mix work?

Thanks for your responses.  Feel free to email me if you'd prefer to discuss offline.

How badly has NSF funding already been effectively cut?

This NY Times feature lets you see how each piece of NSF's funding has been reduced this year relative to the normalized average spanning in the last decade.  Note: this fiscal year, thanks to the continuing resolution, the actual agency budget has not actually been cut like this. They are just not spending congressionally appropriated agency funds.  The agency, fearing/assuming that its budget will get hammered next fiscal year, does not want to start awards that it won't be able to fund in out-years. The result is that this is effectively obeying in advance the presidential budget request for FY26.  (And it's highly likely that some will point to unspent funds later in the year and use that as a justification for cuts, when in fact it's anticipation of possible cuts that has led to unspent funds.  I'm sure the Germans have a polysyllabic word for this.  In English, "Catch-22" is close.)

I encourage you to click the link and go to the article where the graphic is interactive (if it works in your location - not sure about whether the link works internationally).  The different colored regions are approximately each of the NSF directorates (in their old organizational structure).  Each subsection is a particular program.  

Seems like whoever designed the graphic was a fan of Tufte, and the scaling of the shaded areas does quantitatively reflect funding changes.  However, most people have a tough time estimating relative areas of irregular polygons.  Award funding in physics (the left-most section of the middle region) is down 85% relative to past years.  Math is down 72%.  Chemistry is down 57%.  Materials is down 63%.  Earth sciences is down 80%.  Polar programs (you know, those folks who run all the amazing experiments in Antarctica) is down 88%.  

I know my readers are likely tired of me harping on NSF, but it's both important and a comparatively transparent example of what is also happening at other agencies.  If you are a US citizen and think that this is the wrong path, then push on your congressional delegation about the upcoming budget. 

A science anecdote palate cleanser

Apologies for slow posting.  Real life has been very intense, and I also was rather concerned when one of my readers mentioned last weekend that these days my blog was like concentrated doom-scrolling.  I will have more to say about the present university research crisis later, but first I wanted to give a hopefully diverting example of the kind of problem-solving and following-your-nose that crops up in research.

Recently in my lab we have had a need to measure very small changes in electrical resistance of some devices, at the level of a few milliOhms out of kiloOhms - parts in \(10^6\).  One of my students put together a special kind of resistance bridge to do this, and it works very well.  Note to interested readers: if you want to do this, make sure that you use components with very low temperature coefficients of their properties (e.g., resistors with a very small \(dR/dT\)), because otherwise your bridge becomes an extremely effective thermometer for your lab.  It’s kind of cool to be able to see the lab temperature drift around by milliKelvins, but it's not great for measuring your sample of interest.

There are a few ways to measure resistance.  The simplest is the two-terminal approach, where you drive currents through and measure voltages across your device with the same two wires.  This is easy, but it means that the voltage you measure includes contributions from the contacts those wires make with the device.  A better alternative is the four-terminal method, where you use separate wires to supply/collect the current.  

Anyway, in the course of doing some measurements of a particular device's resistance as a function of magnetic field at low temperatures, we saw something weird.  Below some rather low temperatures, when we measured in a 2-terminal arrangement, we saw a jump up in resistance by around 20 milliOhms (out of a couple of kOhms) as magnetic field was swept up from zero, and a small amount of resistance hysteresis with magnetic field sweep that vanished above maybe 0.25 T.  This vanished completely in a 4-terminal arrangement, and also disappeared above about 3.4 K.  What was this?  Turns out that I think we accidentally rediscovered the superconducting transition in indium.  While our contact pads on our sample mount looked clean to the unaided eye, they had previously had indium on there.  The magic temperature is very close to the bulk \(T_{c}\) for indium.

For one post, rather than dwelling on the terrible news about the US science ecosystem, does anyone out there have other, similar fun experimental anecdotes?  Glitches that turned out to be something surprising?  Please share in the comments.