The run up to the new academic year has been very time-intense, so unfortunately blogging has correspondingly been slow. Here are three interesting papers I came across recently:
- In this paper (just accepted at Phys Rev Lett), the investigators have used micro/nanostructured silicon to make an ultraviolet photodetector with an external quantum efficiency (ratio of number of charges generated to number of incoming photons) greater than 100%. The trick is carrier multiplication - a sufficiently energetic electron or hole can in principle excite additional carriers through "impact ionization". In the nano community, it has been argued that nanostructuring can help this, because nm-scale structural features can help fudge (crystal) momentum conservation restrictions in the impact ionization process. Here, however, the investigators show that nanostructuring is irrelevant for the process, and it has more to do with the Si band structure and how it couples to the incident UV radiation.
- In this paper (just published in Science), the authors have been able to implement something quite clever that's been talked about for a while. It's been known since the early days of discussing quantum computing that one can try to engineer a quantum bit that lives in a "decoherence-free subspace" - basically try to set up a situation where your effective two-level quantum system (made from some building blocks coupled together) is much more isolated from the environment than the building blocks themselves individually. Here they have done this using a particular kind of defect in silicon carbide "dressed" with applied microwave EM fields. They can increase the coherence time of the composite system by 10000x compared with the bare defect.
- This paper in Science uses very cool in situ electron microscopy to show how even comparatively soft hairs can dull the sharp edge of steel razor blades. See this cool video that does a good job explaining this. Basically, with the proper angle of attack, the hair can torque the heck out of the metal at the very end of the blade, leading to microfracturing and chipping.
10 comments:
For your question about Twitter, I definitely think there'd be an audience (likely larger than the blog!) for that.
I love this blog, a Twitter account would probably get to more people though
Twitter would get to more people, but I think any discussion is heavily diluted there. Not to mention posts don't age well there.
Speaking of interesting work, I found the recent paper (F. Ando Nature 584, 373–376 (2020)) showing the supercurrent diode effect in a Nb-V-Ta superlattice to be a very simple and powerful development. It will be interesting to see what kind of applications a superconducting diode will have.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2590-4
Doug, you could keep the blog, but use twitter to reach a broader audience and link to blog postings to drive traffic there.
Agreeing with the comment by Anon@2:34AM. Tweeting has limited value for conveying information directly but can usefully point people to web sites (e.g. blogs) with interesting content. Just more work for you, of course.
On the brighter side, twitter is also filled with complete lunatics who can provide a modicum of entertaining babble, from time to time. Search on 'bismuth metamaterial terahertz antigravity' for example.
I'm a moderately senior solid state chemistry professor living on the other side of the world. I've never commented before, but you are already reaching a very broad and interested audience. I've personally recommended many students and colleagues to read the detailed posts which you kindly put up here. My advice is not to bother with twitter and to keep going here. Twitter is an absolute cesspit, and requires a huge amount of dumbing down.
Thanks, all. I was wondering about Twitter in addition to the blog, not instead of the blog. Dan, I didn’t know that you were a blink182 fan :-). I see that Hal Puthoff is on deLonge’s board. Wow.
I respectfully disagree with the chemistry professor who has such a low opinion of twitter. Even though the content is clearly uneven, there is also a universe of interlinked high-quality twitter feeds that are relatively "insulated" from the worthless ones, at least in my field. The content is much more dynamic than blogs (e.g. thanks to retweeting), so on my end I tend to visit good twitter feeds more frequently than blogs.
Twitter is good at getting attention but poor at conveying information and abysmal at conveying nuance.
If you want to reach more eyeballs, being on Twitter would help, but you should redirect people to the papers (and this blog!).
There's nothing more infuriating and off-putting then "Here's something really important. (1/143)"
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