March Meeting, Day 2

This is a meta-post - I'm writing it while sitting in the back of a session on presenting science to the public.  A brief list of some of the neat things I heard yesterday:

• I saw a very nice talk by Jelena Vuckovic about doing nonlinear and cavity optics, with (self-assembled InAs) quantum dots as the emitters, and the cavity being formed in 2d photonic band gap systems.  The latest work looks at nonlinear effects like photon blockade, and makes contact to some work involving "circuit" quantum electrodynamics (see here).
• I went to a talk by Ken Golden, who taught me sophomore differential equations, and he gave a fascinating presentation about applying rigorous math (percolation theory, treating microstructured composites like effective media) to the challenging problem of understanding melting polar sea ice.  As a side note, he showed a great picture that is an example of the "quasistatic limit" - long wavelength surface ocean waves don't "see" individual ice floes, but instead propagate in an effective medium.
• There was a great invited session about oxide heterostructures.  Mobilities are improving (under the right conditions) to the point where some ways of learning about the band structure through electronic transport are now becoming possible.  Very impressive was a talk by Shahal Ilani, where he presented a very compelling view of the importance of structural domains ("ferroelasticity") in the underlying strontium titanate - when those domains are under control, transport becomes much more clean, revealing the apparent existence of a magnetically interesting phase at high carrier density and high in-plane magnetic field.

March Meeting, Day 1

Observations from the first day of the APS March Meeting:

• There has been a lot of progress and excitement in looking at layered materials "beyond graphene".  It's interesting to see a resurgence of interest in transition metal (Ti, but more frequently W and Mo) dichalcogenides (S, Se, Te), a topic of great activity in bulk materials growth in the 1970s and early 80s.  There are clearly a lot of bright people working on ways to grow these materials layer-by-layer, with the long-term idea of making structures somewhat like semiconductor heterostructures (e.g., GaAs/AlGaAs), but with the richer palette provided by these materials (exhibiting charge density waves, strong spin-orbit effects, complex band structure, etc.).  Molecular beam epitaxy of these materials with high quality is generally very hard.  For example, Mo and W are extremely refractory, requiring electron beam evaporation at temperatures exceeding 2500 C, and sticking at the sample surface without much diffusion.  Whoever really gets layer-by-layer, large-area growth working with diverse materials is going to make a big impact.
• I saw Heinrich Jaeger give a great talk about granular materials by design.  These are entirely classical systems, but they are extremely challenging.  If you think about it, they are not crystalline (no long-range symmetries to exploit in modeling), they are non-ergodic (the constituent grains are kinetically limited, and can't explore all possible configurations), and nonlinear (the interactions between particles are short-ranged and very strong).  Very interesting.
• I caught two talks in the session looking at silicon-based quantum information processing.  It's possible to create and manipulate dangling bonds on the Si surface (localized states that can trap electrons) and look at how those bonds interact with each other.  Very neat.  Looking at particular individual impurities, with the right system (erbium in Si), you can couple a single impurity to a single-electron transistor charge sensor.  Then, you can manipulate that impurity with optical techniques and use the charge detection to determine its state.  Very impressive.
• The session on secrecy in science was very good.  The ability to manufacture viruses by design is genuinely frightening (though it loses some menace when the words "Pandemic - millions of deaths?" are projected in Comic Sans).  The discussion of intellectual property was great and the role of universities merits its own blog post.  Lastly, I was unaware of the WATCHMAN project, which is a very interesting neutrino physics experiment that as an added bonus should allow the international community to detect rogue nuclear reactors meant for weapons development.

Upcoming blogging: APS March Meeting + recurring physics themes

This coming week is the APS March Meeting in Denver.  I'll probably blog about some of the talks, but I may not give detailed recaps as I've done in some past years - it's hard to get a complete picture of a meeting that's grown so vast (and I have a ton of work I somehow need to get done over that week).  Topics that are clearly hot, based on the meeting program:  topological everything (insulators, superconductors, Majorana structures, etc.); layered everything (graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, including optical properties); oxide heterostructure materials; quantum information; cold atoms to examine particular condensed matter problems incl systems out of equilibrium; unconventional superconductivity (incl quantum criticality, pnictides, cuprates, etc.); plasmonics.   I'll admit that I'm curious about the future of the New Media in the communication of science to the public. 

I've also been thinking about doing a series of posts really aimed at the public about recurring themes that crop up in physics.  This will require a bit of thought to make the writing really accessible to a general audience, but it could be fun.  This story by Adam Frank was very well done and inspirational in terms of what such a series could be.

Ballistic electrons in graphene nanoribbons at room T: whoa!

The de Heer group at Georgia Tech has a paper in this week's Nature where they present some results on graphene nanoribbons that are quite unexpected and exciting.  Rather than exfoliate graphene from graphite, or grow it via chemical vapor deposition, the Georgia Tech group creates graphene via the controlled transformation of silicon carbide.  In this latest work, they used a vicinal substrate (meaning that it is cut slightly off-axis from a high symmetry direction, so that the surface has regularly spaced atomic terraces).  When this substrate is annealed in a particular way, graphene forms across the surface.  Interestingly, on the plateaus, the resulting material appears to be semiconducting (based on tunneling measurements made by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)), while the steps reconstruct and form sloping sidewalls that have 40 nm wide ribbons that are metallic graphene (as seen through tunneling and photoemission).

Using in situ multiple tungsten STM tips, they are able to measure the conductance of such ribbons as a function of length.  Remarkably, they find that the two-terminal conductance is approximately independent of length (!) over a broad range of lengths (from 0.5 \(\mu\)m to about 16 \(\mu\)m) even at room temperature, and it has the very suggestive value of \(e^{2}/h\), which is what you would expect for a single quantum channel, with one species of the electronic spin.  This kind of violation of "Ohm's Law" is expected when the electrons travel essentially without scattering from one end of a device to the other.  Ordinarily we can't see this at room temperature in macroscopic conductors, because there are many ways electrons can scatter, including inelastic processes involving lattice vibrations.  The authors have a number of other measurements that are consistent with the implication that a single channel is somehow able to propagate ballistically over these long distances at room temperature.  Indeed, they can use additional tips as "passive" scattering centers; placing an additional tip on the wire makes the conductance drop, presumably because that tip is able to cause back-scattering. 

These observations are very interesting, since they suggest that there is some kind of "protected" channel that allows conduction by basically making back-scattering (which would usually contribute to resistance) very disfavored.  The apparent spin polarization (inferred from the conductance value, not measured directly) is also intriguing.  I wonder if the "kink" at the edges of the ribbons where the sidewall transitions to the flat plateaus on either side of the ribbon acts as some sort of source of strong spin-orbit interactions (despite the low \(Z\) of carbon) by distorting the graphene lattice.  In any case, it is nice to see a genuinely surprising graphene result.

What's the deal w/ NIF and fusion?

The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab just published a couple of papers (PRL and Nature) about their latest results in inertial confinement fusion.   The idea is to hit a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet with 192 converging high power laser beams and dump enough energy into the nuclei (by various means) that they can overcome their Coulomb repulsion and fuse, releasing a helium nucleus, a neutron, and energy.  Their latest results demonstrate net "fuel gain" - they are able to infer via complicated means how much energy actually got coupled to the D/T (about 10 kJ in a shot), and from the neutrons they can determine how much energy came out from the fusion reactions (about 15 kJ in a shot).  This sounds great, and it's an important physics milestone for the researchers.  However, something gets lost in the press releases:  They dump in about 1.8 MJ from the lasers to get 10 kJ into the fuel.  That's an input coupling efficiency of 0.05%.  Also, bear in mind that they have to rebuild the whole sample holder and everything before each shot.

While the latest results are a nice and critical physics step, it is extremely hard for me to believe that the NIF approach will ever lead to anything resembling a power plant.  For a sense of scale, the NIF annual budget is something close to $1B, while the US commitment to ITER is on the order of $200M/yr, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab annual budget is around $100M, and the fusion program at Sandia is about $5M/yr.  (For reference, the F-35 fighter program costs about $12B/yr, and the NSF annual budget is around $7B/yr).   NIF is a fascinating physics testbed, a way to study certain processes without detonating nuclear weapons, and the warp core of the most recent iteration of the starship Enterprise.  However, press articles implying that this recent result is a breakthrough toward fusion power are misleading.

Are blogs really changing scientific discourse?

Lately there has been a fair bit of talk (here, for example, or here) about whether blogs, particularly those written by scientists, are actually changing the scientific discourse and the way science gets done (particularly in terms of debating controversies or resolving disagreements).   I was recently asked this by a science journalist, too.

My short answer is, "maybe, sometimes, but mostly 'no'."  (Thus, I am roughly consistent with the old adage that article titles posed in the form of a question are almost always answered by "no".)  The main reason that blogging is, in my view, not having some major transformative effect on science is that the vast majority of scientists do not blog, and a slightly smaller (but still vast) majority do not even read blogs let alone comment on them or ponder writing one.  Blogs are still far and away the exception rather than the rule in terms of how scientific discussions take place.

That being said, when the relevant participants participate in blog discussions (or the equivalent, as on mathoverflow), very cool things can take place.  However, I think the most productive version of this happens either when someone really tries to educate an interested audience (my attempted model here most of the time - a sort of science journalism by scientists), or when informed discussion happens between knowledgeable experts (sort of a virtual version of the kinds of conversations that can happen at good conferences).  I do think that unilateral discussions of controversies can serve a useful purpose.  However, one-sided presentations on the internet are not all peaches and cream, as you no doubt know. 

(A mildly amusing note:  My previous post got a big spike in pageviews thanks to Physics Today tweeting the link.  Thanks, PT!  Hopefully some of those people will stick around.  Of course, my most-viewed post of all time, by about a factor of 3, is still my commentary about whiskey stones.  Clearly I should routinely stake out an aggressive position on some physics point connected to good Scotch.)

Nanotechnology and industry - winning and losing

Thanks to Paul Weiss for pointing me to this article, which asks rather breathlessly (in response to this [pdf] report from the US Government Accountability Office) whether the US is somehow fumbling or screwing up the industrial deployment of nanotechnology.  The US government has sunk quite a bit of money over the last decade and a half into basic (and some applied) research on nanoscale science, clearly with the idea that this will energize the US economy in the long run by producing nanotechnology-based products in industry.  There is clearly some concern about whether the science is really making the transition to manufacturing, or is it stuck in the "valley of death". 

In my view, getting from largely university-based basic research to large scale industrial deployment of a technology is inherently difficult - at least as challenging and probably more so than what used to take place when companies broadly supported comparatively long-term industrial research.  To put it another way, it was always difficult to get something out of the lab and into a product at Bell Labs and IBM in the heyday of industrial research, and that involved technology transfer within a single company.  These days, companies are effectively trying to outsource much basic research to universities - super-short time horizons have combined with market forces to kill most US industrial long-term (that is, more than 3 years from a clear product) research (at least on the physical sciences side).  Companies have to get past the "not invented here" barrier, the fact that universities do not function like industrial labs, the fact that universities do not have the detailed knowledge or specialized equipment of scaled-up manufacturing, potential intellectual property challenges, general risk-averse behavior, etc.

My point is, getting from basic research to industrial deployment is a long, difficult path under the best of circumstances.   With our current system where companies are generally risk averse and they (and depressingly investors) are concerned with next quarter's stock price rather than where they will be in a decade, the situation is extremely challenging.  Be patient, don't panic, but don't be surprised if companies (likely foreign ones) with in-house research and a longer view are able to do well in the nano regime.

Science and public outreach - Nerd Nite

Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at the first Nerd Nite Houston.  Nerd Nite was described to me as "like TED, only with alcohol," which seems to have been pretty accurate.  The event was largely organized by Amado Guloy, a solid state chemist by training who now does IP law, and the first speaker was Andy Boyd, who has been doing serious science outreach as a contributor to the syndicated-on-public-radio Engines of Our Ingenuity.  I spoke last of the three, which had the benefit of letting the audience get, umm, relaxed by the time I took the stage.  In some sense I gave a meta-talk - I was a scientist speaking to a general audience about scientists speaking to general audiences.  The quote in my title - "It's late; we're all tired; why should any of us care about anything you're saying?" - is something that I once heard a certain famously irascible condensed matter theorist say to a startled speaker who had committed the sin of not really giving an introduction to a talk.   Hopefully the video of the talks will be online soon, and when that happens I'll update this post to link there.  The talk went very well, and I had a great time.  The audience was terrific, particularly in the question period, when they asked about a variety of challenging topics (e.g., is the upcoming Bill Nye vs. creation museum guy debate a good thing?  How much can we expect average people to know and understand about science?  Isn't asking average people to trust us on science - taking science as a matter of faith - antithetical to the whole point of science as a skeptical way of interacting with the world?).  The whole experience really made me think yet again about how nice it would be to have a Sagan-esque figure in terms of explaining the cool, fascinating parts of condensed matter (emergence; the crossover from quantum to classical behaviour; the nature of irreversibility; how modern technology has roots in cm physics; to name a few) to the general public.

Speaking of Sagan, I hope that the new version of Cosmos is must-see viewing.  UPDATE:  check out this blog post from the Library of Congress - you can get Sagan's lecture materials and homeworks for a course that he taught at Harvard, and some stuff from a course on critical thinking at Cornell.  Very cool. 

Lastly, if you want a fun example of a Nerd Nite talk, check out "Godzilla:  History, Biology, and Behavior of Hyperevolved Therapod Kaiju". 

Undergrad research - fun, good for students, and sometimes just plain excellent

In the course of doing some graduate admissions and writing many rec letters, I've been thinking about the value of undergrad research experiences.  There is no question that doing one or more reasonably big science research projects can be of real benefit to undergrads in multiple ways.  Most importantly, the student gets to see how real research works - it's very different from problem set exercises and canned labs where you know that there's a well-defined answer or solution.  The student also gets in-depth experience in a particular subfield, so that they can get a sense of whether that's a specific area they might (or might not) like to study further.   In my case, my senior thesis helped me appreciate that I didn't really want to do computational modeling exclusively.  It's also good for students to see how much effort really goes into a big project, and gives them experience (ideally) in budgeting their time, planning, making presentations, structuring and writing a lengthy document, etc.  We've recently had a really nice insight into some mysterious data coming from an undergrad project in my lab, and it's been very fun to go through the process, with the student, of figuring out what the heck is going on, and to have the student come by my office with the confirming data in-hand. 

Sometimes undergrad research can also lead to big scientific results.  Here is a paper (see press release) by Dave Hall's group at Amherst College, where they have used ultracold atoms to create (effective) magnetic monopoles.  Note that this work was done at a liberal arts college by undergrad researchers.  Outstanding!

Fantasy physics, in two senses.

Having read this article, I have a modest proposal for a new, even geekier fantasy sport:  fantasy physics departments.  This would be like a typical fantasy sport.  Each member of the league would have to draft academic physicists, with the proviso that you have to have a reasonably balanced department (e.g., you can't only pick people working on graphene or plasmonics, to goose your citation metrics).  Then you use citations (via google scholar), federal grants (via public records), awards (via news blurbs and CVs), and graduated students/postdocs as a means of keeping score.  The downside of this is that the winning roster may end up being a hiring plan for a university operating in the superstar model of academia. 

Speaking of fantasy and physics, I see that there is a great deal of discussion going on out there in popular books and other settings about "the multiverse" (see here, for example) and even the idea that physics needs to set aside the notion that proper scientific theories need to be falsifiable.  Sorry, but that way lies madness, or at least rampant speculation.  It pains me greatly that a big part of the general public's impression of physics is dominated by people who express fantastical, speculative ideas with few or no qualifiers.  Gahh. 

Self-promotion - two papers, one post

Time for one of my comparatively rare scientific self-promotion posts.  I'm economizing by writing about two new papers in one post.  They're both fun results, and hopefully they're both reasonably accessible to a broad audience.

The first paper is this one.  I've written about plasmons before.   Light can come in and hit a metal nanostructure and be absorbed by exciting a plasmon (a sloshing of the electronic fluid, technically a coherent bunch of electron-hole excitations).  Over time, the energy in that plasmon eventually ends up as heat, slightly broadening the energy distribution of the electrons, and making the atoms vibrate.  A lot of people have been using the plasmon response of metal nanoparticles as a way to generate heat locally, with applications like cooking tumors or boiling water.  It's a real challenge, though, to measure the local increase in temperature, and to tell the difference between plasmon-based absorption and just ordinary absorption (which also dumps energy initially into the electrons, but not in a coherent way).   In our paper, my (now former) postdoc Joseph Herzog was able to do some clever measurements looking at plasmon-based heating in nanowires, with the wire itself being used as a resistive thermometer.  We could separate out the plasmon-based contribution because it has a very strong dependence on the polarization of the incident light, while ordinary absorption doesn't care much about that.  Mark Knight then did some really great optical + thermal modeling, and the results match the experiments very nicely.  Hopefully this will be a useful resource as people work on studying and engineering this kind of plasmon-based heating.  As a bonus, this tells us that in our other optics experiments on similar structures, the heating from having the laser on is probably only a few degrees.

The second paper is here, with a news release here.  Using special optical antenna structures, we have been able to do vibrational spectroscopy on single- or few-molecule junctions while driving current through them.  Previously we have shown that you can see when the electrons have enough energy to pump the molecular vibrations.  Recently, my student Yajing Li found, when looking at junctions containing C₆₀, that the energies of vibrational states (that is, the natural frequencies of the molecular vibrations) were systematically lower when a decent voltage was applied across the junction.  Initially, we thought that this was an example of something called the vibrational Stark effect, and we turned to theorist colleagues (Jeff Neaton and his student Peter Doak, and Leeor Kronik) to see if that explanation held water.  It turns out, no, this is not the vibrational Stark effect (which is too small and also does not systematically lower vibrational energies).  Instead, when we apply a voltage across the junction, we slightly increase how much electron density is sitting on the molecule.  That slight increase is enough to soften some of the molecular bonds a little, and therefore lower the vibrational frequencies.  In chemistry lingo, we are partly filling an antibonding orbital, so that weakens the bonds.  The theory does a nice job explaining the shape and magnitude of what we see (though there is still plenty to do in terms of understanding the details).  For the science fiction fans in my readership:  Unfortunately there is no obvious way to run this the other direction and arbitrarily dial up the strength of molecular bonds, so I will not be opening a company called General Products that sells unbreakable spacecraft hulls. 

Favor to ask - looking for a video clip.

Now that some big deadlines have passed and I'm worn out before the semester even starts, I'm hoping my readership can help me out.  I'm working on a public talk about presenting science to a general audience, and I would like to include a video clip from a Futurama episode, "Where No Fan Has Gone Before".  Specifically, to talk about the problems with using analogies to explain complicated concepts, I'd love to have video of this bit:

Fry: Usually on the show, they came up with a complicated plan, then explained it with a simple analogy.
Leela: Hmmm... If we can re-route engine power through the primary weapons and configure them to Melllvar's frequency, that should overload his electro-quantum structure.
Bender: Like putting too much air in a balloon!
Fry: Of course! It's all so simple!

It doesn't seem to exist on youtube.  Of course, this would be properly credited to Fox, and would be considered fair use from the standpoint of copyright.  Thanks for any suggestions or help.

UPDATE:  Thanks to one of you, I'm all set!  Thanks!

Links and thanks at the end of another year

Thank you, readers, for another year.  It is gratifying to hear from you and to meet people who have found this blog useful and informative (or at least worth noticing, which is something these days).  My posting frequency slumped quite a bit at the end of 2013 because of various writing commitments (a couple of which continue).  I'm hoping to have some more to say in the coming year, and I hope that there are opportunities out there to get some of the coolness of condensed matter and nanoscale physics to the general public as well as my more specialized readers.

Here are a few end-of-year links for your enjoyment:

• Sometimes people put amusing or snarky comments in the acknowledgments sections of papers.  Who knew?  (Full disclosure:  It's possible that the "M. Fleetwood" acknowledged in this paper is a musician.)
• Scientists and mathematicians have their own special brand of humor.  (I love the Mandelbrot joke.  This does omit one of my favorites:  What is purple and commutes?  An Abelian grape.)
• Bob Laughlin is jumping back into physics aiming to make a big splash:  He basically is arguing (see this preprint) that there really is no such thing as a Mott insulator.  That's a rather radical statement at this point, given (for example) experiments with optical lattices that seem to show that the Mott insulator appears to exist as a realizable state.  (I'm sure there are ways to argue that those experiments are not really in the thermodynamic limit and involve interactions that are not the Coulomb interaction, etc.)
• Snowflakes are still cool.  (A repeat, but worth it.)

I was plagiarized - what happened, and how I handled it.

Last week I received an email from a scientist asking me for a copy of one of my articles, and the correspondent pointed out:  "On a tangent it would appear that your work is highly prized by fellow researchers.  I include your work and that of an admirer.  Not sure if its worth chasing this up or not?" while attaching a copy of one of my group's papers, and a copy of a paper published here.  I was surprised to find that the other paper (published in August of 2013) was a copy-and-paste plagiarism job, approximately 70% from our paper and 30% from my former student's doctoral thesis.  This was not some minor issue of someone "borrowing" a paragraph - this was a full blown appropriation of all of the words and claims, including a discussion of what future work could be done at Rice (!) on these systems.  Nothing subtle here - no possible legitimate excuse.

What I did next probably cost me a huge bump in my readership.  If I wanted to goose my numbers,  I should have pointed this out to the folks who run Retraction Watch.  I did plan to do so.  However, I actually followed their own advice on how to handle the issue, at least broadly.  After notifying my former student with an email having the subject "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", I used the "contact us" link on the publisher's website to tell the editor what I'd found, explaining that this paper needed to be retracted.  You notice that I don't link to the paper in question.  That's because instead of retracting it, the publisher "disappeared" the paper.  The link I had doesn't work anymore; the paper no longer shows up in the online table of contents; it's as though the paper never existed at all.  Not what I expected to happen, but on the scale of possible outcomes, not the worst.

The authors (a student and professor) are from some tiny college in India.  I couldn't find email addresses (or really any history of publication) from either one, but I was able to get an email address for the department head there.  I emailed him (explaining what I'd found, and how in the US I would have contacted someone at his university with a title like "research integrity officer"), and was pleasantly surprised to get a response within a day, agreeing that this was "terrible", and saying that he would take it up with the faculty member and the "proper authorities".  This morning, I received an apologetic email from the professor, placing all of the blame on his student.

Some observations:

• Even if the student submitted the paper, the professor has some culpability - his name is on it, and someone paid the publication charges (a whopping $75US, which tells you something about the journal).
• It is abundantly clear that the paper was never seen by any reviewer of any kind.  It literally jumped, in mid sentence in a grammatically awful way, from one spot to another in the copy/paste from our paper, skipping over all the surface chemistry stuff.  The discussion included from the thesis mentioned Rice explicitly.  No one who read this would have thought that this work was done at the home institution of the supposed authors.
• "Disappearing" a paper is wrong - a legit journal should retract the work, or publish an expression of concern, or something, not make it look like this never happened.
• I suppose I should be happy with the outcome (paper gone, publisher chastened, professor at least disciplined somehow by his chair), and given the lack of academic footprint of the student and professor, I'm not sure there is any point in mentioning them by name - I'd rather resign them to obscurity.
• This was so absurd (absolute copying without any attempt to hide it, in an obscure "journal"), my reaction really was one of almost amusement.  My former student's reaction was definitely more one of anger, which is understandable given that it was his thesis that was being stolen.

We'll see what comes next.  I suppose I should be flattered - this is a sign that I've made it, right?  Like some weird kind of peer review?  My group's work is worth stealing.

Another workshop + some links

It's been a very hectic end-of-semester, between classes, research, and writing.  Thank all of you for your replies concerning power outages.  Perhaps recurring power problems are actually some secret motivator to get all of us to work on alternative energy research - I'll invent an arc reactor just to guarantee reliable power.

Right now, my colleagues and I here at Rice are hosting another workshop, this one on heavy fermions and quantum criticality.  For those who don't know, "heavy fermions" are found in materials where there are particular magnetic interactions between mobile charge carriers and localized (usually 4f) electrons.  Think of it this way:  the comparatively localized electrons have a very flat, narrow band dispersion (energy as a function of momentum).  (In the limit of completely localized states and isolated atoms, the "band" is completely flat, since the 4f states are identical for all the same atoms.)  If you hybridize those comparatively localized electrons with the more delocalized carriers that live in s and p bands, you end up with one band of electron states that is quite flat.  Since \(E \sim (\hbar^2/2m*)k^2\), a very flat \(E(k)\) would be equivalent to a really large effective mass \(m*\).  Heavy fermion materials can have electron-like (or hole-like) charge carriers with effective masses several hundred times that of the free electron mass.   These systems are interesting for several reasons - they often have very rich phase diagrams (in terms of magnetic ordered states), can exhibit superconductivity (!), and indeed can share a lot of phenomenology with the high temperature superconductors, including having a "bad metal" normal state.  In the heavy fermion superconductors, it sure looks like spin fluctuations (related to the magnetism) are responsible for the pairing in the superconducting state.

Quantum criticality has to do with quantum phase transitions.  A quantum phase transition happens when you take a system and tune some parameter (like pressure, temperature, doping, etc.), and find that there is a sharp change (like onset of magnetic order or superconductivity) in the properties (defined by some order parameter) of the ground state (at zero temperature) at some value of that tuning (the quantum critical point).  Like an ordinary higher temperature phase transition, one class of quantum phase transitions is "second order", meaning (among other things) that fluctuations of the order parameter are important.  In this case, they are quantum fluctuations rather than thermal fluctuations, and there are particular predictions for how these things survive above \(T = 0\) - for example, plotting properties as a function of \(\omega/T\), where \(\omega\) is frequency, should collapse big data sets onto universal curves.  There appears to be an intriguing correlation between quantum critical points, competition between phases, and the onset of superconductivity.  Fun stuff.

A couple of links:

• Higgs doesn't think he would have gotten tenure in today's climate.  
• Elsevier is still evil, or at least, not nice.
• A higher capacity cathode for Li-ion batteries looks interesting.
• NIST has decided to award their big materials center to a consortium led by Northwestern. 

Quick survey of my readers at R1 universities

I'm trying to gather some information, informally.  If you're at a tier-1 research university in the US or Canada, please tell me how many power failures your university has had this year, or in a typical year.  By "power failure", I mean a campus-wide outage lasting at least a second.  It's better if you can mention the name of the university.  (Rice readers, I already know the answer for us - no need to chime in.)  Follow up:  if you know, does your university have big uninterruptible supplies for particular facilities or buildings?  Thanks. 

Some interesting links

Several interesting links have crossed my virtual radar this past week.

• Here is a (rather over-written) article about how one of the big proponents of massive online open courses (MOOCs) has realized that they are not really a panacea for higher education.
• As Peter Woit reports, there is going to be a 90th birthday bash for Phil Anderson next month.  (No, I was not invited, though he did fall asleep in a seminar by me once.)  More interesting is Anderson's letter to the APS News, where he points out that he was not, in fact, single-handedly responsible for killing the SSC.
• Also in the APS News was a two-part interview (here and here) with Elon Musk.  He's either The Man Who Sold The Moon, or a Bond supervillain.
• This video is a great set of demonstrations about magnetic fields and forces, though the speaker uses some very nonstandard terminology, so it's a bit hard to figure out exactly what's going on.  
• Here, Prof. Laithwaite does a further cool demo of a very heavy gyroscope.
• Charles Day was written a thought-provoking essay about the academic job market.

Coauthorship

I've been asked by a colleague to write a post about coauthorship.  This topic comes up often in courses on scientific ethics and responsible conduct of research.  Like many of these things, my sense is that good practice prevails in the large majority of circumstances, though not 100% of the time.  I think my views on this are in line with the mainstream, at least in condensed matter physics.  First, to be a coauthor, a person has to have made a real intellectual contribution to the work, somewhere in the planning, execution, analysis, and/or writeup stages.  Simply paying for a person's time, some supplies, or lending a left-handed widget does not alone entitle someone to coauthorship.   It's best to have straightforward, direct conversations with potential coauthors early on, before the paper is written, to make sure that they understand this.  A couple of times I've turned down offers of coauthorship b/c I felt like I didn't really contribute to the paper; once, for example, one of my students did some lithography for a colleague as a favor, while offering advice on sample design.  She rightfully was a coauthor, but I hadn't really done anything beyond say that this was fine with me.

The challenge is, the current culture of h indices and citation metrics rewards coauthorship.  People coming out of large research groups with many-person collaborative projects can end up looking fantastic in some of these metrics, a bias exacerbated if coauthorships are distributed lightly.  Research cultures that have very hierarchical structures can also lead to "courtesy" coauthorships (Does the Big Professor or Group Leader who runs a whole institute or laboratory automatically end up on all the important papers that come out of there, even if they are extremely detached from the work?  I hope not.).

Coauthorship entails responsibilities, and this is where things can get ethically tricky.  As a coauthor, minimally you should contribute to the writing of the manuscript (even if that means reading a draft and offering substantive comments) and actually understand the research.   Just understanding your own little piece and having no clue about the rest is not acceptable.  At the same time, it's not really fair to expect, e.g., the MBE materials grower to know in detail some low-T, rf experimental technique tidbit, but s/he should at least understand the concepts.  A coauthor should know enough to ask salient questions during the analysis and writeup.   

Note that all of this gets rather murky when dealing with very large, collaborative projects (e.g., particle physics).  When CERN collaborations produce a paper with 850 coauthors, do I think that each of them really read the manuscript in detail?  No, but they have a representative system with internal committees, etc. for internal review and deciding authorship, and the ones I talk to are aware of the challenges that this represents.

Some topics lend themselves more to a back-an-forth in the comments, and this may be one.  I'm happy to try to answer questions on this.

The Orthogonality Catastrophe (!)

Physicists sometimes like to use dramatic terminology to describe phenomena or ideas.  For example, the Ultraviolet Catastrophe was the phrase describing the failure of classical statistical physics to predict the correct form of thermal ("black body") radiation in the high frequency ("UV" at the time) limit.  The obvious disagreement between what seemed like a solid calculation (based on equipartition) and observation (that is, you are not bathed by gamma radiation from every thermal emitter around you) was a herald of the edge of validity of classical physics. 

In condensed matter physics, there is another evocative phrase, Anderson's Orthogonality Catastrophe.  (Original paper)   Here's the scenario.  Suppose we have a crystal lattice, within which are the electrons of an ordinary metal.  In regular solid state physics/quantum mechanics, the idea is that the lattice provides a periodic potential energy for the electrons.  We can solve the problem of a single electron in that periodic potential, and we find that the single-particle states (which look a lot like plane waves) form bands.  The many-electron ground state is built up from products of those single-electron states (glossing over irrelevant details).  The important thing to realize is that those single-particle states form a complete basis set - any arrangement of the electrons can be written as some linear combination of those states.  (For students/nonexperts:  This is analogous to Fourier series, where any reasonable function can be written as a linear combination of sines and cosines.  Check out this great post about that.) 

Now, imagine reaching in and replacing one of the atoms in the lattice with an impurity, an atom of a different type.  What happens?  Well, intuitively it seems like not much should happen; if there were 10²² atoms in the lattice, it's hard to see how changing one of them could do much of anything.  Indeed, if you compared the solutions to the single-particle problem before and after the change, you would find that the single-particle states are almost identical.  However, "almost" means "not quite".  Suppose the overlap between the new and old single particle states was 0.9999999, where 1 = no change.  For \( N \) electrons, that means that the new many-particle ground state's overlap with the old many-particle ground state is goes something like \( 0.9999999^{N}\).  For a thermodynamically large \(N\), that's basically zero.  The new many-particle ground state is therefore orthogonal to the old many-particle ground state.  In other words, in terms of the old basis, it seems like adding one impurity (!) produces an infinite number of electron-hole excitations (!!) (since it takes an infinite number of terms to write the new many-particle ground state in terms of the old).

So, where does this fall apart?  It doesn't!  It's basically correct.  The experimental signature of this ends up being apparent in x-ray absorption spectra, in a variety of meso/nano experiments (pdf), and in cold atoms (pdf).  

Any other good physics examples of overly dramatic language? 

blogging and academic honesty

Paul Weiss and the editorial board of ACS Nano seem to have ignited a bit of a controversy with their editorial published a couple of weeks ago.  The main message of the editorial seems to chastise bloggers and other social media users regarding accusations of scientific misconduct.  As with many positions taken on the internet, there is a defensible point of view (in this case, "It is better to try to go through an investigative procedure regarding misconduct, given that the consequences of a false public accusation can be very severe") that was expressed in an inartful way (coming across as scolding, and implying that people who criticize published work are likely not necessarily accomplishing science themselves).  As my mom used to say, sometimes it's not what you say, but how you say it that matters.   Clearly, as this extremely long thread on ChemBark and this response editorial by Nature will attest, there are differing views about this issue.  Here's my take (not that I have any privileged point of view - your mileage may vary):

• Public accusations of misconduct or incompetence should never be made lightly.  If misconduct is really suspected, then the appropriate first course of action is to contact the relevant journal and ideally the research integrity officer (or equivalent) at the authors' home institution.  Public accusation should not be a first recourse.
• Journals should deal with accusations in a timely way.  Years passing before resolutions of inquiries is unacceptable.  Authors stonewalling by refusing to respond to inquiries is unacceptable.  While authors should be given every opportunity to respond, it is also not appropriate to, e.g., refuse to publish a comment because the authors drag their heels on writing a response.  
• No one has yet come up with a perfect feedback mechanism.  Things like pubpeer are better than nothing, but anonymous commenting, like anonymous peer review, is a double-edged sword.  Yes, anonymity protects the vulnerable from possible retaliation.  However, anonymity also leads to genuinely awful behavior sometimes. 
• People are going to make public comments about the scientific literature - that's the nature of the internet, and in general that's a good thing.  I would hope that they will do this with due consideration.  The journals are free to encourage people to pursue concerns within the journal system, but it's not productive to imply that people who draw attention to suspect figures (for example) are somehow poor scientists or gleeful bullies. We're all on the same side (except the cheaters).