Brief items

Some science items that crossed my path that you may find interesting:

• This article at Quanta is a nice look at the Ising model for a general audience.  When I took graduate statistical mechanics from Lenny Susskind, he told the story of Lars Onsager just casually mentioning on the middle of a conference talk that Onsager had solved the 2D Ising model exactly.
• If you have any interest in the modern history of advanced transistors, the special FinFET ones that are now the mainstays of ultrascaled high performance processors, you might find this article to be fun.
• With all the talk about twisted bilayers of van der Waals materials for exotic electronic properties, it’s cool to see this paper, which looks at the various nonlinear optical processes that can be enabled in similar structures.  Broken structural symmetries are the key to allowing certain nonlinear processes, and the moire plus twist approach is quite the playground.
• This preprint is very cool, where the authors have made basically an interferometer in the fractional quantum Hall regime for electrons confined in 2D, and can show clean results that demonstrate nontrivial statistics.  The aspect of this that I think is hard for non-experimentalists to appreciate is how challenging it is to create a device like this that is so clean - the fractional quantum Hall states are delicate, and it is an art form to create devices to manipulate them without disorder or other problems swamping what you want to measure.

Coming at some point, a post or two about my own research.