Brief items

 As we careen toward the end of the spring semester, here are a few interesting links for perusal:

• My colleagues at the Rice Center for Quantum Materials are running a mini-workshop this week about topology and correlations in condensed matter.
• More broadly, there is a new site for all things quantum at Rice.  More news in the coming weeks....
• Speaking of quantum, I thought that this paper was pretty impressive as a technical achievement.  The authors are able to cool a mechanical resonator (a suspended aluminum drumhead, essentially) down to 500 microKelvin (!), so cold that \(k_{\mathrm{B}}T\) is smaller than the harmonic oscillator energy levels - down to the quantum ground state for its center of mass motion.  As someone who built a nuclear demagnetization stage as part of my PhD, I have to respect achieving that temperature for a sample in vacuum.  Likewise, as someone who studied tunneling two-level systems in solids, it's impressive to see the logarithmic temperature dependence of sound speed in the aluminum extend smoothly down to below 1 mK.  
• On a more general thermodynamic topic, this paper really surprised me. It's a review article about the existence of a dynamical crossover (the "Frenkel line") that exists above the critical temperature and pressure for a number of fluids - basically a separation into different regimes of response (not true phases per se).  Embarrassingly, I'd never heard of this, and I need to find the time to read up on it.
• I'm late to the party on this, as it got quite a bit of press, but this paper is really interesting - special engineered light modes that are designed to propagate without distortion (though with attenuation) through scattering media.  There are many potential applications, such as medical imaging (with light or with ultrasound).
• Anyone want a dinner plate-sized chip with 2.4 trillion transistors?