DOE ECMP PI meeting, day 1 - things I learned

Yesterday was an extremely dense meeting day.  Many talks, many posters.  By its nature, this meeting is far more technical than the Packard meeting, so the bullet points below are going to be more obscure to the nonexpert.  The program is here.  Among the things I learned yesterday:

• Harold Hwang continues to do very interesting physics at the interface between LaAlO3 and SrTiO3, looking at fundamental issues like the limits of charge mobility in the 2d electron gas there, and how to make delta-doped bilayers.
• Many other people are playing with oxide and pnictide MBE, making pnictide superlattices, strain-controlled pnictides, multiferroic films, etc.
• It is possible to use the elastic deformation of VO2 at the metal-insulator transition to alter the magnetic coercivity of an overlying Ni layer. 
• In strained films, it is possible to see through x-ray techniques that one can decouple the electronic transition in VO2 from the structural transition.  
• Real progress has been made recently in using engineered structures of nanomagnetic patterns to model complex systems like spin ice.
• Nd2Fe14B, the rare-earth hard magnet, can take up hydrogen into its open structure, and when it does, the lattice expands, which greatly softens the magnetic response.
• Mott insulating materials can be synthesized that exhibit quantum criticality at zero magnetic field and as-made.
• Iridates are interesting and complicated.
• Investing in developing a particular technique (in this case, NMR of unusual elements like oxygen, sodium, and arsenic) can pay big long-term dividends in terms of unique experimental insights (e.g., there are no "static loop currents" flowing in the cuprate superconducting state).