Brief items - Sarachik, Feynman, NSF postdocs and more

 Here are several items of interest:

• I was saddened to learn of the passing of Myriam Sarachik, a great experimental physicist and a generally impressive person.  I was thinking about writing a longer piece about her, but this New York Times profile from last year is better than anything I could do.  This obituary retells the story to some degree. (I know that it's pay-walled, but I can't find a link to a free version.)  In the early 1960s, after fighting appalling sexism to get a doctorate and a position at Bell Labs, she did foundational experimental work looking at the effect of dilute magnetic impurities in the conduction of nonmagnetic metals.  For each impurity, the magnetic atom has an unpaired electron in a localized orbitals.  A conduction electron of opposite spin could form a singlet to fill that orbital, but the on-site Coulomb repulsion of the electron already there makes that energetically forbidden except as a virtual intermediate state for a scattering process.  The result is that scattering by magnetic impurities gets enhanced as \(T\) falls, leading to an upturn in the resistivity \(\rho(T)\) that is logarithmic in \(T\) at low temperatures.  Eventually the localized electron is entangled with the conduction electrons to form a singlet, and the resistivity saturates.  This is known as the Kondo Effect based on the theoretical explanation of the problem, but Sarachik's name could credibly have been attached.  Her family met with a personal tragedy from which it took years to recover.  Later in her career, she did great work looking at localization and the metal-insulator transition in doped semiconductors.  She also worked on the quantum tunneling of magnetization in so-called single-molecule magnets, and was a key player in the study of the 2D metal-insulator transition in silicon MOSFETs.  I was fortunate enough to meet her when she came through Rice in about 2003, and she was very generous in her time meeting with me when I was a young assistant professor.  Sarachik also had a great service career, serving as APS President around that time.  Heck of a career! 
• The audio recordings of the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics are now available for free to stream from Caltech.  You can also get to these from the individual lectures by a link on the side of each page.
• There is a new NSF postdoctoral fellowship program for math and physical sciences.  I would be happy to talk to anyone who might be interested in pursuing one of these who might want to work with me.  Please reach out via email.
• I've written before about the "tunneling time" problem - how long does quantum mechanical tunneling of a particle through a barrier take?  Here is an experimental verification of one of the most counterintuitive results in this field:  the farther "below" the barrier the particle is (in the sense of having a smaller fraction of the kinetic energy needed classically to overcome the potential barrier), the faster the tunneling.  A key experimental technique here is the use of a "Larmor clock", with the precession of the spin of a tunneling atom acting as the time-keeping mechanism.
• Did you know that it is possible, in Microsoft Word, to turn on some simple LaTeX-style symbolic coding?  The key is to enable "Math Autocorrect", and then typing \alpha will automatically be turned into \(\alpha\).  (I know act like doing scientific writing in Word is heretical, but not everyone in every discipline is facile with LaTeX/Overleaf.)