25 years of Nano Letters

Back in the dawn of the 21st century, the

American Chemical Society founded a new journal, Nano Letters, to feature letters-length papers about nanoscience and nanotechnology.  This was coincident with the launch of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, and it was back before several other publishers put out their own nano-focused journals.  For a couple of years now I've been an associate editor at NL, and it was a lot of fun to work with my fellow editors on putting together this roadmap, intended to give a snapshot of what we think the next quarter century might hold.  I think some of my readers will get a kick out of it.  

Learning and AI/LLMs - Why do we need to know or teach anything anymore?

The fall semester is about to begin at my university, and I'm going to be teaching undergraduate statistical and thermal physics.  This is a course I've taught before, last full term in 2019, and the mass availability of large language models and generative AI tools have changed the world in the interim.  We've all seen the headlines and articles about how some of these systems can be very good at solving traditional homework and exam problems.  Many of these tools are capable of summarizing written material and writing essays that are very readable.  Higher education is wrestling with the essential question:  What is the right working relationship between students, teachers, and these tools, one that benefits and actually educates students (both about subject matter and the use of these tools)?  Personalized individual AI tutoring seems like it could be great for teaching huge numbers of people.  Conversely, if all we are doing is teaching students to copy-paste assignments into the homework-answer-machine, clearly we are failing students at multiple levels.  

The quote in the image here (from Kathy Hepinstall Parks) is one that I came across this week that originates in the FAQ from a writers workshop.  For my purposes I could paraphrase:  Why should we learn physics (or any other science or engineering discipline) when a machine already knows the formalism and the answers?  On some level, this has been a serious question since the real advent of search engines.  The sum total of human knowledge is available at a few keystrokes.  Teaching students just rote recall of facts is approaching pointless (though proficiency can be hugely important in some circumstances - I want a doctor who can diagnose and treat ailments without having to google a list of my symptoms.).

My answer to this question is layered.  First, I would argue that beyond factual content we are teaching students how to think and reason.  This is and I believe will remain important, even in an era when AI tools are more capable and reliable than at present.  I like to think that there is some net good in training your brain to work hard, to reason your way through complicated problems (in the case of physics, formulating and then solving and testing models of reality).  It's hard for me to believe that this is poor long-term strategy.  Second, while maybe not as evocative as the way creative expression is described in the quote, there is real accomplishment (in your soul?) in actually learning something yourself.  A huge number of people are better at playing music than I am, but that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile to me to play the trumpet growing up.  Overworked as referencing Feynman is, the pleasure of finding things out is real.  

AI/LLMs can be great tools for teachers.  There are several applet-style demos that I've put off making for years because of how long it would take for me to code them up nicely.  With these modern capabilities, I've been able to make some of these now, in far less time than it would otherwise have taken, and students will get the chance to play with them.  Still, the creativity involved in what demos to make and how they should look and act was mine, based on knowledge and experience.  People still have a lot to bring to the process, and I don't think that's going to change for a very long time.

20 years of Nanoscale Views, + a couple of things to read

Amazingly, this blog has now been around for more than twenty years (!) - see this first post for reference from June of 2005, when I had much less gray hair and there were a lot more science blogs.  Thanks to all of you for sticking around. Back then, when I debuted my writing to my loyal readers (all five of them at the time), I never thought I'd keep this up.  Some info, including stats according to blogger:

• Total views: 8.3M
• Most views in one day, this past May 31, with 272K
• Top two most-viewed posts are this one from 2023 with a comment thread about Ranga Dias, and this one from 2009 titled "What is a plasmon?"
• Just a reminder that I have collected a bunch of condensed matter terms and concept posts here.
• I've also written some career-related posts, like a guide to faculty job searches, advice on choosing a graduate school, needs-to-be-updated advice on postdoc positions, etc.
• Some personal favorite posts, some of which I wish had gotten more notice, include the physics of drying your hands, the physics of why whiskey stones aren't as good as ice to cool your drink, materials and condensed matter in science fiction, the physics of vibranium, the physics of beskar, the physics of ornithopters, and why curving your pizza slice keeps if from flopping over.  I'm also happy with why soft matter is hard, which was a well-viewed post.
• I also like to point out my essay about J. Henrik Schön, because I worry that people have forgotten about that episode.

Real life has intruded quite a bit into my writing time the last couple of years, but I hope to keep doing this for a while longer.  I also still hope one day to find the right time and approach to write a popular book about the physics of materials, why they are amazing, and why our understanding of this physics, limited as it is, is still an astonishing intellectual achievement. 

Two other things to read that I came across this week:

• This post about Maxwell's Demon from the Skull in the Stars blog (which has been around nearly as long as mine!) is an excellent and informative piece of writing.  I'm definitely pointing my statistical and thermal physics undergraduate class to this next month.
• Ross McKenzie has a very nice looking review article up on the arXiv about emergence. I haven't read it yet, but I have no doubt that it will be well-written and thought-provoking.

Brief items - Static electricity, quantum geometry, Hubbard model, + news

It's been a busy time that has cut into my blogging, but I wanted to point out some links from the past couple of weeks.

• 
  Physics Today has a cover article this past issue about what is colloquially known as static electricity, but what is more technically described as triboelectricity, the transfer of charge between materials by rubbing.  I just wrote about this six months ago, and the detailed mechanisms remain poorly understood.  Large surface charge densities (like \(10^{12}\) electronic charges per square cm) can be created this way on insulators, leading to potential differences large enough to jump a spark from your finger to the door handle.  This can also lead to static electric fields near surfaces that are not small and can reveal local variations in material properties.
  
• That leads right into this paper (which I learned about from here) about the extreme shapes of the heads of a family of insects called treehoppers.  These little crawlies have head and body shapes that often have cuspy, pointy bits that stick out - spines, horns, etc.  As we learn early on about electrostatics, elongated and pointy shapes tend to lead to large local electric fields and field gradients.  The argument of this paper is that the spiky body and cranial morphology can help these insects better sense electric field distributions, and this makes it easier for them to find their way and avoid predators. 
• This manuscript on the arXiv this week is a particularly nice, pedagogical review article (formatted for Rev Mod Phys) about quantum geometry and Berry curvature in condensed matter systems.  I haven't had the chance to read it through, but I think this will end up being very impactful and a true resource for students to learn about these topics.
• Another very pretty recent preprint is this one, which examines the electronic phase diagram of twisted bilayers of WSe2, with a relative twist angle of 4.6°.  Much attention has been paid to the idea that moiré lattices can be in a regime seemingly well described by a Hubbard-like model, with an on-site Coulomb repulsion energy \(U\) and an electronic bandwidth \(W\).  This paper shows an exceptionally clean example of this, where disorder seems to be very weak, electron temperatures are quite cold, and phase diagrams are revealed that look remarkably like the phenomena seen in the cuprate superconductors (superconducting "domes" as a function of charge density adjacent to antiferromagnetic insulating states, and with "strange metal" linear-in-\(T\) resistance in the normal state near the superconducting charge density).  Results like this make me more optimistic about overcoming some of the major challenges in using twisted van der Waals materials as simulators of hard-to-solve hamilitonians.

I was all set to post this earlier today, with no awful news for once about science in the US that I felt compelled to discuss, but I got sidetracked by real work.  Then, late this afternoon, this executive order about federal grants was released.  

I can't sugar coat it - it's awful.  Ignoring a large volume of inflammatory rhetoric, it contains this gem, for instance:  "The grant review process itself also undermines the interests of American taxpayers."   It essentially tries to bar any new calls for proposals until a new (and problematic) process is put in place at every agency (see Sect. 3(c)).  Also, it says "All else being equal, preference for discretionary awards should be given to institutions with lower indirect cost rates."  Now, indirect cost rates are set by negotiations between institutions and the government.   Places that only do very small volumes of research have low rates, so get ready for MIT to get fewer grants and Slippery Rock University to get more.  The only certainty is that the nation's lawyers are going to have a field day with all the suits that will come out of this.

Research experience for teachers - why NSF education funds matter

The beginning of a RET poster session

Research Experience for Teachers (RET) programs are an example of the kind of programs that the National Science Foundation funds which are focused on K12 (and broader) education. This summer I hosted a high school physics teacher in my lab for 6 weeks, where he worked on a brief project, with one of my doctoral students helping out in a mentoring role.  Just yesterday was the big poster session for all of the participants in the program, and it was very enjoyable to talk with a whole cadre of high school science teachers from across the greater Houston area about their projects and their experiences.  

Readers may be more familiar with the sibling Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs, which give undergraduate students the chance to work for 10 weeks or so in a lab that is very likely not at their home institution.  REUs are a great way for students interested in research to get broad exposure to new topics, meet people and acquire new skills, and for some, figure out whether they like research (and maybe which topics are exciting to them).  The educational goal of REUs is clear:  providing direct research experience to interested undergrads, ideally while advancing a research project and for some small fraction of students resulting in an eventual publication.  

RET programs are different:  They are intended as professional development.  The teachers are exposed to new topics, hopefully a fun research environment, and they are encouraged to think carefully about how they can take the concepts they learn and translate those for the classroom.  I am very much not an expert in education research, but there is evidence (see here, for example) that teachers who participate in these programs get a great deal of satisfaction and have lower attrition from teaching professions.  (Note that it's hard to do statistics well on questions like that, since the population of teachers that seek out opportunities like this may be a special subset of the total population of teachers.)  An idea that makes sense to me:  Enhancing the motivation and job satisfaction of a teacher can have a larger cumulative impact on educating students than an individual research project for a single student.

It would be a great shame if RET and REU programs are victims of large-scale cuts at NSF.  The NSF is the only science agency with education as part of its mission (at least historically).  All the more reason to try to persuade appropriators to not follow the draconian presidential budget request for the agency.

The latest on US science funding

The US House and Senate appropriations subcommittees have now completed their markups on the bills relevant to the FY26 appropriations for NSF, NASA, and NIST.  The AAAS has an interactive dashboard with current information here if you want to click and look at all the science-related agencies.   Other agencies still need to go through the Senate subcommittees. 

Just a reminder of how this is supposed to work.  The House and Senate mark up their own versions of the detailed appropriations bills.  In principle these are passed by each chamber (with the Senate versions for practical purposes requiring 60/100 votes of support because of the filibuster).  Then a conference committee hashes out the differences between the bills, and the conference version of the bills is then voted on by each chamber (again, needing 60/100 votes to pass in the Senate).  Finally, the president signs the spending bills.  In the fantasy land of Schoolhouse Rock, which largely described events until the 1990s, these annual spending bills are supposed to be passed in time for the start of the new fiscal year on October 1.  In practice, Congress has been deeply dysfunctional for years, and there have been a lot of continuing resolutions, late budgets, and mammoth omnibus spending bills.  

To summarize:

• NSF - House recommendation = $6.997B (a 20.7% cut from FY25), Senate = $9B (a 2% increase from FY25).  These are in sharp contrast to the presidential budget request (PBR) of a 55.8% cut.
• NASA - House = flat from FY25, Senate = $24.9B (0.2% increase).  
• NIST - House = $1.28B (10.6% increase from FY25), Senate = $1.6B (38.3% increase from FY25)
• NOAA - House = $5.7B (28.3% increase from FY25), Senate = $6.1B (36.3% increase from FY25)

DOE has gone through the House, where the Office of Science is recommending a 1.9% increase, in contrast to a 13.9% cut in the PBR.  

If you are eligible and able to do so, please keep pushing.  As I wrote a few days ago, this is a long-term project, since appropriations happen every year.  As long as you're making your opinions known, it's good to push on representatives and senators that they need to hold the agency leadership accountable to actually spend what congress appropriates. 

A science post soon....

US science funding - now time to push on the House appropriators

Some not-actively-discouraging news out of Washington DC yesterday:  The Senate appropriations committee is doing its markups of the various funding bills (which all technically originated in the House), and it appears that they have pushed to keep the funding for NASA and NSF (which are bundled in the same bill with the Department of Justice for no obvious reason) at FY24 levels.  See here as well.  

This is not yet a done deal within the Senate, but it's better than many alternatives.  If you are a US citizen or permanent resident and one of your senators is on the appropriations committee, please consider calling them to reinforce how devastating massive budget cuts to these agencies would be.  I am told that feedback to any other senators is also valuable, but appropriators are particularly important here.

The House appropriations committee has not yet met to mark up their versions.  They had been scheduled to do so earlier this week but punted it for an unknown time.  Their relevant subcommittee membership is here.  Again, if you are a constituent of one of these representatives, your calls would be particularly important, though it doesn't hurt for anyone to make their views heard to their representative.  If the House version aligns with the presidential budget request, then a compromise between the two might still lead to 30% cuts to NSF and NASA, which would (IMO) still be catastrophic for the agencies and US science and competitiveness.

This is a marathon, not a sprint.  There are still many looming difficulties - staffing cuts are well underway.   Spending of already appropriated funds at agencies like NSF is way down, leading to the possibility that the executive branch may just order (or not-order-but-effectively-order) agencies not to spend and then claw back the funds.  This year and in future years they could decide to underspend appropriations knowing that any legal resistance will take years and cost a fortune to work its way through the courts.  This appropriations battle is also an annual affair - even if the cuts are forestalled for now (it is unlikely that the executive would veto all the spending bills over science agency cuts), this would have to happen again next year, and so on.

Still, right now, there is an opportunity to push against funding cuts.  Failing to try would be a surrender.

(Obligatory notice:  yes, I know that there are large-scale budgetary challenges facing the US; I don't think destroying government investment in science and engineering research is an intelligent set of spending cuts.)