Items leading into the APS March Meeting

This will be the first virtual APS March Meeting.  It's also taking place at a time when many universities in the US have eliminated spring recess, and no one is getting out of town for the conference.  This means that faculty and students are going to try to balance attending virtual talks and some level of networking/social interaction along with the usual business of the university.  Between that and the reluctance to sit immobile in front of a screen for many hours at a time, it will be interesting to see how this goes.  Here is the information available so far on how the meeting is actually going to work in terms of zoom/web access/discussions.  More information is reportedly on the way.

In the meantime, the biggest condensed matter news item of the week is the retraction of the Majorana fermion paper discussed here.  

• The official investigative panel report on this matter is available here.  The panelists detail multiple issues with the paper, and conclude that "the most plausible explanation [is] that the authors were caught up in the excitement of the moment, and were themselves blind to the data that did not fit the goal they were striving for. They have "fooled themselves" in the way forewarned by Feynman in the speech we quoted at the beginning of section 3."
• Another analysis is here.  An inescapable conclusion is that making the data sets available greatly helped in figuring out what went on here.  
• Here is a youtube video that goes over this from the technical perspective.

In other news:

• Here is an updated version of a paper by my postdoctoral mentor showing interferometric evidence for the braiding of other exotic quasiparticles.   This is an implementation of ideas related to these proposals (1, 2).  One point of commonality with the Majorana ideas:  exquisitely clean material is needed to see the interesting physics, and preserving that lack of disorder when fabricating devices is really hard.