Physics intuition and a follow-up

I just had two interesting experiences. First, I spent a couple of hours reading a PhD thesis on a topic that had a strong tie to nonlinear dynamics and chaos. It had all the fun stuff: Poincare sections, phase space localization, etc., in the context of classical elliptical orbits with "kicks" applied as drive. While reading this, I had the realization that I had very little physical intuition for this system, even though it's in many ways an old problem. For example, the statement that, in this 1/r^2 central force problem, trajectories with large angular momentum have less orbital eccentricity did not seem obvious to me - I really had to think about it. Why do I have more intuition for nanoscale and quantum systems than classical central force problems? Because I hardly ever work on the latter. Physical intuition is the intellectual equivalent of muscle mass in some specific group. If I don't exercise the Poisson bracket/Runge-Lenz vector part of my physics brain, it atrophies.

The second experience also relates to intuition. Remember this post? PRL followed up with me last August. They said that they'd looked into my concerns about data manipulation, and that the author (not clear which one they contacted) had shown them "unprocessed" data, and that things looked ok to them. Well, I've been contacted by a colleague at another institution who read my blog post about this, figured out which paper I meant (!), and alerted me to other questionable figures in other publications. Updates as events warrant.

This week in cond-mat

Briefly emerging from my end-of-semester fog, here are some interesting preprints from the past week.

The graphene craze continues unabated. Remember how the superconductivity community descended upon MgB2 and made every superconductivity-related measurement under the sun on the new material in a feeding frenzy? A similar phenomena is taking place with the 2d electron community and graphene. Fortunately, graphene seems to be pretty neat stuff! For example:
arxiv:0704.3165 - Hill et al., Graphene spin valve devices
People have done normal metal contacts to graphene, and superconducting contacts to graphene, so what's left but ferromagnetic contacts to graphene? Unsurprisingly you can use ferromagnetic electrodes to inject spin into graphene, and its such a low-Z material of high purity that both spin-orbit scattering and spin flip scattering from impurities are minimal, leading to real spintronic possibilities in this stuff.

Further exploiting the robustness of graphene even under significant processing:
arxiv:0704.2626 - Huard et al., Transport measurements across a tunable potential barrier in graphene
arxiv:0704.3487 - Williams et al., Quantum Hall Effect in a graphene pn junction
arxiv:0704.3608 - Abanin and Levitov, Quantized transport in graphene pn junctions in magnetic field
Because graphene is a high quality 2d material and can be shifted readily from n and p carriers via doping or gating, it is possible to set up sophisticated structures (npn or pnp junctions; pn junctions) while preserving long mean free paths. The result is rich phenomenology, as seen in the first two (experimental) papers listed here, and analyzed in detail in the third (theory) paper. I'm still waiting for a really unexpected graphene result that isn't readily explained.

Two other papers that involve tunable model systems to examine strong correlation physics:
arxiv:0704.3011 - Bloch et al., Many-body physics with ultracold gases
This is a review article about using cold atoms to look at nontrivial correlation effects. One holy grail in this business is to use strongly interacting cold fermions in a 2d optical lattice to explicitly simulate the Hubbard model (relevant to high-Tc superconductivity), a topic of much interest to one of my faculty colleagues.

arxiv:0704.2614 - Walsh et al., Screening of excitons in single, suspended carbon nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes have 1d band structures, and therefore are subject to strong electron-electron interaction effects and poor screening. The consequence of these interactions is the demise of Fermi liquid theory, and therefore the onset of the fractionalized quasiparticles (spinons and holons) of Luttinger liquid theory. Excitons are also strongly modified in these systems. One way to probe these effects is to change the effective interaction; this is done by using immersion in dielectric media to change the screening of charges, and the effects are probed spectroscopically.

This week in cond-mat, self-indulgent edition

Two cond-mat papers this week, and one other item.

arxiv:0704.1775 - Yu et al., Origin of discrepancies in inelastic electron tunneling spectra of molecular junctions
This paper is by my former student, Lam Yu, now at NIST in Maryland. It is a systematic study of a relatively long-standing problem in the molecular electronics field. Electrons can undergo off-resonant tunneling through molecules; that is, the electrons tunnel from one electrode to the other via the molecule, even though there are no molecular levels aligned with the filled electronic states of the electrodes. You can think of this as a second-order tunneling process: while actually putting an extra electron on the molecule is classically forbidden by conservation of energy, one can consider a second order tunneling process where the electron-on-the-molecule is a virtual intermediate state. If a sufficient bias voltage exists between the source and drain electrodes, and the nuclear wave functions work out right (i.e., Franck-Condon factors), one can have processes where the electron tunnels on to the vibrational ground state of the molecule and tunnels off a vibrationally excited state of the molecule, all in one process. This is the key to inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy, where such vibrational excitations result in a signature in the IV characteristics of the electrode/molecule/electrode sandwich (nominally a peak in d^2I/dV^2). The problem is, experiments have shown a variety of lineshapes rather than simple peaks. Lam's work shows that the presence of metal ions within the molecular layer can result in complicated lineshapes like those seen in some experiments.

arxiv:0704.0451 - Ward et al., Electromigrated nanoscale gaps for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy
This paper comes out of my own group. It has been known for some time that metal nanostructures driven at their plasmon resonances can act like little optical antennas, so that the local electromagnetic field near, e.g., metal nanoparticles can be much larger than the incident electromagnetic field. Since Raman scattering (a common vibrational spectroscopy) is a nonlinear optical process that scales like (roughly) the fourth power of the electric field, it is a prime candidate for these enhancement effects. In some geometries, single-molecule Raman sensitivity has been demonstrated. In this paper, we have shown that the electromigrated nanoscale gaps that we use for single-molecule electronic transport experiments are extremely good for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). We show that one can make these structures in a scalable way, with a high yield, and they show all the hallmarks of few- or single-molecule sensitivity. We're very excited about where we might go with this....

Finally, this past weekend came the first announcement of results from Gravity Probe B, or as my friends and I liked to call it, "The Project that Ate Stanford". GPB is a satellite-based test of general relativity. My thesis advisor remembers Leonard Schiff coming to Cal Tech in 1964 and talking about how GPB was only a couple of years away. What does this have to do with condensed matter? Well, the folks building this thing produced a lot of good science trying to understand thin film niobium superconductors, including a technique using lead balloons (no, really) to produce volumes with magnetic fields smaller than anywhere else in the known universe. Anyway, the finally have announced some results - so far, they've found that GR does a good job (within 1%, anyway) at describing the bending of space near the earth. It would appear that the analysis of the main effect they're trying to see, "frame dragging" of spacetime by the rotation of the earth, is being hampered by annoying systematics in their experiment. Hopefully they'll get it worked out, though they suffer from a sociology of science problem: if they confirm GR, no one will be surprised; if they refute GR, no one may believe the result because the experiment is so complicated. Ahh well.

End of semester and a short break

Just a quick post.... We're approaching the end of the semester, and with several looming thesis defenses, a thesis prize committee commitment, an internal search for an administrative position, and various external deadlines, I will be cutting back on blogging for the next two or three weeks, with the possible exception of "This week in cond-mat" posts....

A paper and a wager

One paper on the arxiv that I need to read more closely: cond-mat/0701728, Sukhorukov et al., Conditional statistics of electron transport in interacting nanoscale conductors. This paper, a collaboration between Rochester, Geneva, and ETH Zurich, looks at the noise properties of transport through a quantum dot in the presence of a charge detector, in this case a quantum point contact (QPC). A QPC is a constriction in a 2d electron gas with a width modulated by gates. If the QPC is tweaked such that it's right on the boundary of pinching off a transverse electronic mode, its conductance can depend strongly on the local charge environment, which acts like an extra gate. By monitoring the conductance of the QPC, the authors can watch tunneling events in the capacitively coupled quantum dot. The presence of an electron on the dot reduces the conductance of the QPC. Like most of the very pretty work to come out of Enslinn's group at ETH, the quantum dot and QPC are defined through local AFM-based surface oxidation of a shallow 2d electron gas in a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure. What I don't understand about this paper is a statement in the introduction: "An important property of the QPC charge detector is its noninvasiveness: the system physically affects the detector, not visa-versa." Strictly speaking, this just can't be right. If the quantum dot is capacitively coupled to the QPC sufficiently to modulate the QPC current flow, there has to be back-action of the QPC on the dot charge. While that interaction may be small, it can't be nonexistent, as far as I can see.

An unrelated anecdote: some of you may remember this post, where I talked about Steorn, an Irish company that took out a full-page ad in the Economist magazine looking for scientists to act as a "jury" of some sort and evaluate their "free energy" machine. Well, it would appear that Steorn did manage to find some scientists willing to act as a "jury", whatever that means, and will release some sort of report of their findings this Friday. I actually did communicate with Steorn last fall; while they had some interest in talking to me, they did not come close to answering my questions about how their jury process was supposed to work (e.g., would scientists actually be able to play with the gadget in an off-site laboratory; did Steorn really mean that their machine produced energy, or were they trying to finesse conventional jargon by talking about "coefficients of performance greater than one" (which may mean nothing for a refrigerator, for example)). I'm willing to wager that they have not discovered a loophole in the first law of thermodynamics. It will be interesting to hear what they report, and whether any actual scientists would be willing to stand up and back Steorn's claims.

Update: Sean McCarthy of Steorn informs me that my comments above are inaccurate, and that, indeed, their evaluation will be based on tests specified by their "jury" in an independent laboratory. My apologies for any confusion. This was not clear to me last fall, and I haven't been following this in the interim. I should also point out that my interactions with them were entirely cordial and businesslike.

I reiterate, though, that I think there is zero chance that these folks have been able to circumvent conservation of energy. If they have, I will happily eat my words, as this would be the biggest science story of the century. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Palate cleanser

Alright - after all of the recent seriousness, this blog needs a palate cleanser. How about a few fun links? For example, comic book artist and animator Neal Adams has some, umm, intriguing ideas about geophysics, such as the notion that the earth expanded greatly in diameter in the last 70 million years or so. Oh, and it's not just the earth. Mars, too.

I also recommend some Tom Lehrer music videos, if you haven't seen them before, like this, this, and this.

What I will and won't discuss, and comments

I'm annoyed that I have to make this post, but I guess that I'm going to have to actually set some sort of policy.

In the course of discussions related to the faculty job search process, comments have been made by posters regarding specific people and their job performance. Some of these comments have been about anonymous faculty or candidates; others have not. Some have been by anonymous posters; others have not.

Unfortunately (though understandably), Blogger does not allow me to go in and redact individual names from comments, as far as I know. I can either leave the comment alone or delete it altogether.

Consider this fair warning. If you post a comment that I think is inappropriate, I will delete it. In this case, I think anonymous comments that single out specific people (that is, where the identity of the subject of discussion is unambiguous, even if the full name isn't given) for criticism about their job performance and tenure chances are inappropriate. This policy isn't censorship - you're free to start your own blog and post whatever you want on it. I'm not going to provide a forum for those discussions.

UPDATE: Upon further reflection, I've deleted more comments from the previous thread, scrubbing out potential identifiers. I think I was able to preserve most of the insightful commentary while removing the tawdry gossip. I don't want to moderate posts, but I may have to go in that direction in the future. I wish blogger had an alternative to wiping out comments, but considering that the service is free, I shouldn't complain.

A primer on faculty searches, part III

Here is my long-delayed third post about faculty searches, a follow-up to Part I and Part II. One reason for the delay is that I was chairing a search. That took quite a bit of time, and I also didn't want to give an unfair advantage to any of our candidates who happened to read my blog.

In Part II I'd described the process in fairly complete detail. What I want to do here is give a few pointers to would-be candidates, and answer a couple of questions that people have emailed me in the interim.

• Look over the department webpages before you visit. If the school gives you an advanced or draft copy of your schedule, actually look at the pages of the people you're going to meet. More than likely, most of the people you meet are on the search committee. You want to have some sense of what they do so that you can (a) ask decent questions as you meet them, and (b) pitch your own stuff at the right level. An astro person may not have any idea what "valley degeneracy" is.
• Listen to what your point of contact tells you about who the audience is for your talk(s). No one wants a talk aimed at the wrong level. If you're supposed to give a general colloquium, that usually means that your audience is very broad and may contain undergrads, grad students, and faculty from different subfields. If you're supposed to give a seminar, that usually implies a more specialized audience. Remember, people need to know why they should care about what you're doing.
• Rehearse your talk. Speak clearly. Do not speak super-fast, especially if you use technical terms or people's names.
  
• Listen carefully to physics questions that you're asked, either in the talk or one-on-one. Repeat the question back at the person asking, rephrased slightly to confirm that you know what you're being asked. It's ok to say "I don't know" in response to a question, but don't use that dismissively. If you think of the answer later, make it a point to try to tell the questioner.
• Don't use terms that you don't understand or can't explain. Don't assume that everyone in the audience has heard of the So-and-so Effect. Make sure that you know all the relevant numbers for your work. If you're a theorist and someone asks you how to measure the effect you're calculating, at least have a handwave idea. If you're an experimentalist and someone asks you about errors and uncertainties, make clear that you've thought about those issues.
  
• When discussing budgets, etc., make sure that you know who actually is the point of contact for negotiations like that. In our case it's the department chairperson.
  
• The rule on startup packages is generally "you might as well ask". Show some reasonable judgment, though. A junior person asking for $5M in startup is not reasonable. A junior person asking for 5000 sq.ft. of lab space is not reasonable.
• Find out whether lab renovation costs are counted separately from your startup. That's the case at all the big schools, but some places can be funny about this.
• Ask about the tenure process. Ask about tenure history in that department.
  
• Ask about the department's long-term plan - where are things trending?
• Find out what their schedule is. When do they think they will be wrapping up the search?
  

I've been asked about whether politics can enter decision making in these searches. Someone emailed me who had not been offered a position somewhere despite having multiple first-author papers, and the candidate that had been offered the position had many fewer and less postdoc experience. The short answer is, well-run searches make decisions based on the whole package (departmental needs; research quality; communications ability; personal interactions; etc.). So, it can be hard to say from the outside why a particular committee made particular decisions. Can there be poorly run searches? Can there be searches where one category or need trumps the others, and the candidates don't know about that, and isn't that unfair? Sure, and we don't do that because it's long-term stupid - that's not the way to hire for the future and build up a department. I'm not sure that the situation is worse in academia than in any other profession, though. There is no question that where someone comes from and what their "pedigree" is can have a big impact, as discussed here by the Ponderer, but the process is inherently complicated. Hopefully these postings have clarified things at least a little.

This week in cond-mat

Much as it pains me to admit this, I agree with Lubos Motl about something: Neither of us like the new numerical identifier system launched by Paul Ginsparg and company at the arxiv. Lubos nails both of my complaints. While the old system actually conveyed information (the subject area of the paper and how many papers in that category had been submitted that month), the new system manages to be both cryptic and uninformative. Frankly I don't care how many total papers have been submitted from all categories in the arxiv, and I'm not sure why anyone would. Somehow this reminds me of the apparent desire of the Powers that Be to switch NSF proposal submissions from FastLane, which works extremely well and is easy to use, to grants.gov, which is completely arcane and annoying. Prof. Ginsparg, if you see this, please consider switching back to some incrementally changed form of the old system.

Meanwhile, here's one paper in the old numbering format, for old time's sake, that I thought looked interesting. Perhaps a theorist could take a look at this and tell me if it's as clever and neat as it seems to be.

cond-mat/0703768 - Ostlund, The strong coupling Kondo lattice model as a Fermi gas
The Kondo lattice is a model developed in an attempt to understand the heavy fermion compounds. In this model, there are itinerant conduction electrons, and a lattice of localized unpaired moments (f-shell electrons) representing the ion cores of the rare earth constituents of the heavy fermion material. Under the right conditions, the ground state of these materials is a Fermi liquid, meaning that there are distinct, gapless, electron-like (spin 1/2, charge -e) quasiparticles, but they have an effective mass hundreds of times higher than the free electron mass. The idea is that the conduction electrons have formed fully screened Kondo singlets with the rare earth f-electrons. The true ground state of the Kondo problem is a Fermi liquid, and in this limit the ground state of the Kondo lattice is also a Fermi liquid, though the antiferromagnetic screening of the ion cores leads to the high effective mass. Note that this is rather special - in semiconductors, the effective mass is a single-particle effect that comes from the lattice potential; in these systems, the effective mass is the result of many-body correlations. In this paper, the author explicitly writes down a canonical transformation (read: clever change of variables) that directly maps the Kondo lattice Hamiltonian into that of a weakly interacting Fermi gas. It looks clever to me, but I can't judge it in the context of other theoretical treatments of these strongly correlated systems.

Gabrielse talk

This'll be my last talk description for a while, I promise. Colloquium today was Gerry Gabrielse, talking about their group's latest measurements of the g factor of the electron (really [g/2-1]) and the accompanying inferred value for the fine structure constant. Gabrielse did open his talk with most of this clip, since it's about their work. On a random note, I TAed the first author on that first paper once when he was an undergrad.

Precision measurement physics is extremely impressive in its own way. They measure g to parts in 10^13, and \alpha to parts in 10^10 by doing incredibly precise spectroscopy on a single trapped electron in a magnetic field. To really do this right, they have to get rid of all the relevant black body photons in the microwave range, meaning that they have to cool their cavity down to 80 mK. They also need to account for cavity QED effects - again it's a restricted density of states argument. They get the lifetime for spontaneous emission of a microwave photon from the first excited state to the ground state of their trapped electron to be 260 times what it would be in free space. They achieve this lifetime enhancement by making sure to operate their cavity such that there just aren't any cavity modes available at the right energy for the would-be photon to occupy. A tour de force piece of work. I'm pretty sure that precision measurement like this would drive me bonkers.

Frank Wilczek talk, part two

Frank Wilczek gave his second talk at Rice, "The lightness of being", about the origins of mass and the "feebleness" of gravity. He demonstrated the relative weakness of gravity very effectively by jumping up and down, showing that by using a tiny amount of chemical energy, he could overcome (temporarily) the gravitational attraction of the entire planet. I'll admit that I was a bit disappointed in this talk, in the sense that there was more overlap with yesterday's public lecture than I was expecting. I did come away having learned a new way to think about the origin of the mass of the nucleons, though. Wilczek's most famous contribution to physics is asymptotic freedom of quarks, which can be summarized as this: unlike the other forces that weaken with interparticle distance, the gluon-mediated color charge interaction between quarks grows as the separation between quarks is increased. One result of this is that there are no free quarks - if you try and separate a lone quark, the energies involved in the strong interaction become large enough to favor creation of quark-antiquark pairs. So try to build a nucleon out of three quarks. The quarks have to be pretty localized relative to each other, so that from far away there is no unscreened color charge. Localizing quantum mechanical objects leads to a particle-in-a-box type kinetic energy, though. You can think of this as coming from the uncertainty principle. It's this internal kinetic energy that is the source of 95% of the mass of the proton, via m = E/c^2. Voila - mass comes about due to quantum confinement. "Nano" concepts at work on the "femto" scale.

Another interesting point that Wilczek made: the near-perfect conservation of mass law identified by Lavoisier in chemical reactions is a great example of an emergent law. Strictly speaking, mass isn't conserved - energy is. That's very clear at particle accelerators, where a colliding e-e+ pair can produce particles massing 30000x that of the two electrons. The reason that chemistry doesn't see this effect is very much in the spirit of condensed matter. The excitation spectrum of the bound quarks is very strongly gapped. There are no available excited states of the coupled quark system at the few-eV energies relevant to chemical reactions. This basic idea, that processes can be suppressed because of a lack of available states, is also prevalent in much nanoscale physics.

I asked him about the proton "spin problem", as discussed recently here. At issue is where does the intrinsic angular momentum of the proton come from. Wilczek pointed out that there actually isn't any discrepancy with theory; lattice QCD does give spin-1/2 as the final total. What rubs people the wrong way is that the calculations run counter to most intuition. Rather than that angular momentum coming from the spins of the quarks, it appears that much of it comes from the gluon field. There you have it.

Finally, in the Q&A period, someone asked Wilczek about the possibility of extra dimensions - from context, I assume "large" ones. Wilczek really doesn't like this idea; he favors supersymmetry-driven Planck-scale grand unification. He said that it's hard enough accomplishing that and not running into problems like proton decay, and that pushing unification to lower energies (as would happen in the large extra dimension case) would cause all kinds of difficulties like that. I hadn't heard this said before, and would be curious to know more about it. Presumably the proponents of these extra dimension ideas have thought about this.

Frank Wilczek talk, part one

Frank Wilczek is visiting Rice for two days this week, and is giving two talks. I was fortunate enough to have lunch with him. He's amazingly smart, and extremely versatile. You really don't run into too many people who are conversant on the highest levels of high energy theory (hey, the guy did win a Nobel for asymptotic freedom) and also on the highest levels of condensed matter (he's very interested in non-Abelian statistics and topological quantum numbers in condensed matter systems). His first talk, a public (named) lecture entitled "The Universe is a strange place," was this afternoon. As you might expect from someone as adept at writing physics for a general audience, Wilczek gave a very clear presentation that surveyed modern high energy physics. He discussed ideas relevant from QCD - that most of the mass of nucleons comes from the energy balled up in their constituent quarks and gluons rather than from the rest mass of the quarks. He also emphasized strongly the idea that quarks and other fundamental particles are simply organized, long-lived excitations of underlying quantum fields that are always fluctuating on short time scales (h/mc^2) and length scales (10^-13 cm for nucleons). I hadn't appreciated before that after fixing only three masses (e.g., the K, pi, and b-bbar mesons) lattice QCD nails all the other hadron masses. He talked briefly about dark matter and dark energy, and explained his reasoning for liking supersymmetry. In his words, either the beautiful ideas of supersymmetry are right, leading to unification of the running strong, electroweak, and gravitational couplings, with testable consequences in the form of superpartners detectable at the LHC; or, Nature is cruelly teasing us.

At the very end an audience member asked his opinion on string theory. Wilczek said that string theory was not, properly, a theory - it was not a well-defined set of equations with real predictive solutions (as in QCD). While recognizing the value of aesthetics and symmetry, he clearly understands that the real test of theory is experiment, not intrinsic beauty. (Cue Lubos denouncing Wilczek in 5, 4, 3, ....). He went on to say that it was a collection of very interesting ideas, that it may one day get to an actually predictive form, and that there were only a small number of approaches out there for treating quantum gravity.

Long-term research, companies, and universities

I've posted about this topic before, but Gordon Watts' recent post on the subject of long-term research makes me want to throw this out there again. That, and the disturbing news I heard at the APS March Meeting about a round of layoffs of some of the few remaining physical sciences researchers at Bell Labs. It's terribly depressing: since my time in high school, long-term industrial R&D has been gutted in this country (and in most of the world). "Long-term" now means two years. Companies are under so much pressure to have year-over-year quarterly revenue increases that they blanch at the idea of spending money on something risky that may not lead to a big revenue stream quickly. Maybe that's always been true to some extent, and places like Bell Labs and IBM Research (and RCA and GE Research and GM and Ford Scientific and Westinghouse Research) were all effectively accidental monopolies or near-monopolies when they had major research labs. It's demonstrably much worse now.

More distressing to me is the tacit assumption, mentioned by Gordon, that university research will somehow pick up the slack. That is, federal dollars are more appropriate for this kind of basic work, and companies can always fund university labs to do work for them, too. Anyone who knows how university research actually works can tell you many reasons why this is a bad idea. Apart from low-level practical considerations (publish vs patent? foreign vs. domestic students? export controls?), the big killer here is just one of resources. Back when I was at Bell, if they wanted to they could have put a dozen condensed matter PhDs to work on a problem, along with technical support staff. Given how universities work, with teaching commitments, administrative tasks, student timescales, etc., no university achieve that kind of critical mass.

This week in cond-mat

A few highlights from this week, though brief. I've actually been working on my book rather than writing as much. Coming soon: more about faculty searches (now that I don't have to worry that my comments could give an unfair advantage to any candidate, since we're past the interviewing stage).

cond-mat/0703230 - Karabacak et al., High frequency nanofluidics: an experimental study using nanomechanical resonators
With my mech-E background, I've always liked fluid dynamics and lamented that it gets left out of the typical physics curriculum. This is a nice use of nanomechanical resonators as a means to study fluid motion via the resulting damping of the resonator. Of particular interest is the transition between Newtonian flow (shear stress on a wall given by the product of a viscosity times the velocity gradient at the wall) and non-Newtonian flow (shear stress depending on shear rate, for example; cornstarch in water gets stiff at high shear rates, while mayonnaise gets softer at high shear rates. Both are non-Newtonian fluids).

cond-mat/0703374 - Katsnelson and Novoselov, Graphene: new bridge between condensed matter physics and quantum electrodynamics
This is a good, pedagogical review of a lot of the interesting physics seen in electronic transport in graphene. Because of its band structure, electrons and holes in graphene act rather like ultrarelativistic particles (that is, their energy is approximately linearly proportional to their (crystal) momentum, like photons). The discussion in this paper of the Klein paradox is particularly nice; I hadn't read such a clear summary of it before.

cond-mat/0703247 - Malyshev, DNA double helices for single molecule electronics
This has already come out in PRL. While I'm sure the calculations are reasonable and robust, this is a classic example of a theory proposal that is much easier to talk about than ever actually try. My main problem here is that actually preparing electronic devices from DNA and ending up with a controlled system is incredibly hard. There are compensating ions all over the place; DNA in vacuum or on a surface is not nearly the same thing as in a biological environment, including its conformations. Ahh well.

cond-mat/0703419 - Zhang et al., Noise correlations in a Coulomb blockaded quantum dot
Yet another pretty piece of experimental work from Harvard and Tokyo. Using a combination of tank circuits (RLC resonators), cold voltage amplifiers, and a cross-correlation system, these folks are able to measure shot noise in a Coulomb-blockaded quantum dot. They can use a gate to tune the dot in and out of blockade, and can watch the noise vary from sub- to superPoissonian (that is, are the electrons behaving independently (Poisson statistics for tunneling), avoiding each other (sub-Poissonian), or bunching (super-Poissonian). It all looks so easy, though I know experiments like this are very challenging.

Quote verification?

Last week at the APS, Lars Samuelson closed his nano-related talk with the following quote, reportedly from Albert Einstein: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." Can anyone tell me the primary source of this quote, and whether it's legitimate? I've googled a bit, and all I've found are lists of quotes that appear to have circulated online since the mid 1990s, with no primary source attribution. Since a number of fake quotes propagate online, I want to check this one out. Thanks....

MM2007 - final thoughts

Well, I'm back home from APS. I'll write a bit more about the science over the weekend, but for now, here are some last thoughts on the meeting.

Three things that are frustrating about conferences:

• Speakers that run way over their time. There was an invited talk this morning that was physically very interesting, but the speaker must've run 10 minutes over. The timer goes off - no sign of conclusions. The session chair stands up. No slowing down. The session chair whispers in the ear of the speaker. "I'm concluding." Followed by three more slides.
• Senior people that get your name wrong. Repeatedly. In front of a full room.
  
• Parallel sessions on nearly identical topics at opposite ends of the convention center.

Four good things about conferences:

• Senior people that do cite you, and get your name right.
• Competitors that do similar measurements that complement your work and are nice about it, and good agreement between the independent experiments. (Hurray! Science actually works!)
  
• Former students doing well in their careers.
• Good audiences that ask smart questions.

More MM07

More good physics at the APS meeting, though I'm rapidly approaching the point of mental exhaustion.

There was an invited symposium on silicon nanoelectronics on Wednesday that was very nice - I only saw the first three talks, but they were all good. Steve Lyon from Princeton spoke about his ESR measurements on small numbers of electrons in Si/SiGe heterostructures and dots. Mark Eriksson from Wisconsin gave a good overview of their recent work on trying to get gate-defined quantum dots in Si/SiGe to act as nicely as those in GaAs/AlGaAs. A main point of physics in both of those talks was the effect of valley degeneracy on spin physics in those structures. In bulk Si the bottom of the conduction band is 6-fold degenerate and not located at k=0. In quantum wells or heterojunctions, the degeneracy is partially lifted due to the broken spatial symmetry. Mark and Steve have both been worrying about the size of the splitting in energy between the lowest valley and the next valley, and Mark's work looks like it answers the question in gate-defined dots. The third talk was by my old friend Sven Rogge now from Delft. There he has been working on making measurements on states confined to individual dopant atoms in ultrasmall Si transistors. It's extremely interesting to look at how the hydrogen-like donor wavefunctions hybridize with Si well states when the gate field pulls the electron from the donor toward the well.

Today I've seen two very smooth talks in nanostructures sessions. In the first Amir Yacoby, late of the Weizmann Institute and now at Harvard, showed new work on transport through "double dot" structures made from two metal nanoparticles linked by a small organic molecule. At low temperatures and voltages, the physics is dominated by Coulomb charging effects of the two nanoparticles. They see all kinds of rich Coulomb blockade behavior that can be modeled basically perfectly with only a few free parameters (the capacitances and resistances of the relevant junctions). The second was a talk by Lars Samuelson at Lund. He's one of the big movers and shakers in growing semiconductor nanowires. He gave a full overview of their work on this, which has included some obscene number of high impact publications. People with that kind of productivity are simultaneously impressive and depressing.

Incoherent Ponderer is absolutely right about the graphene thing. I've heard some nanotube folks griping that graphene is the new hotness.

The accidental session chair

I can already tell that I have one big thing in common with my thesis advisor besides our first name: I have a tough time saying 'no' to favors when asked nicely. As a result, I became a session chair this morning when the designated chair didn't show up. Ahh well.

Some neat science that I saw today:

• Buckley Prize talk by Jim Eisenstein, covering his work on liquid crystalline phenomena in high Landau levels of 2d electron systems, and his work on exciton superfluidity in 2d electron bilayers. I want to get him to come to Rice for a Keck seminar or physics colloquium this fall - the physics is really pretty.
• STM experiments by Mike Crommie's group at Berkeley looking at optically induced isomerization switching of azobenzene molecules. Now I know why our own efforts in this direction met with some difficulties. The switching gets quenched in regular azobenzene when the molecule is physisorbed on Au(111). Functionalizing the molecules to weaken their coupling to the metal surface leads to some switching, though even then the cross-section seems to be very small - long exposure to lots of photons = switching of maybe 5% of the molecules.
  

Thoughts from the APS March Meeting

I would live-blog the APS meeting, except that the wireless connection at the Denver convention center is completely dysfunctional. I saw some nice talks today after arriving here, but I'll save science until tomorrow. For now, a couple of remarks:

• $2.97 for a cup of coffee? Seriously?
• What is the deal with the recorded laughter that plays on the escalator up to Exhibition Hall F? Is it supposed to put me in a good mood? It doesn't - it creeps me out. Escalators aren't supposed to be jolly. They're supposed to be escalators.
• There are now a large number of vendors selling cryostats that get down to 100 mK, and at least two cryogen-free models. Maybe Oxford Instruments will be forced to adapt now that they have real competition.
• Overheard in Bush Airport on the way here: "I'm a dentist, and wait 'til you hear about my alternate use for KY jelly!"
  

Jim Carrey and Conan O'Brian: quantum mechanics

This video that Kristen Kulinowski sent me is great. metadatta gets major street cred for figuring out which paper this refers to.