APS March Meeting 2023, Day 1

Ahh, Las Vegas.  I will say, I think every APS March Meeting from now on should have a giant Ferris wheel right by the registration lobby.   

Here are a few highlights from what I saw after I arrived around lunchtime today:

• Given some of my current research, I spent a fair bit of time at the invited session about strange metals today.   All of the talks that I saw were very strong.  Andrew MacKenzie spoke about recent measurements of the Lorenz number in such materials (particularly Sr3Ru2O7) and made a persuasive case that strange metals do look different in their temperature-dependent thermal conductivity, because of very strong electron-electron scattering.  This is discussed in this recent review article.  
• In the same session, Brad Ramshaw showed very pretty angle-dependent magnetoresistance data on Nd-LSCO, an archetypal cuprate, arguing that the whole data set can be modeled very well assuming conventional quasiparticles and Boltzmann equation analysis (albeit with a funky combination of temperature-independent anisotropic scattering and strongly temperature dependent isotropic scattering).  His postdoc Gaël Grissonnanche expanded on this and looked at how such a model can also reproduce the linear-in-B magnetoresistance in this system.
• At the McGroddy Prize session, James Hone gave a very nice overview of the impressive body of work from Columbia over the years on all of the stackable van der Waals materials.  Some particular recent highlights included: (1) using deliberately oxidized WSe2 (into WOx) as a low-disorder, very high workfunction material that modulation dopes holes when stacked on a target layer of interest; (2) Using vdW material ferroelectricity to modulate superconductivity in MoTe2; in-progress work using an AFM + an hBN "handle" to bend a graphene "noodle" to get continuously tuned, clean moiré potentials; and electrostatically actuated sliding motion of monolayer vdW material.

Hopefully crowd control will be a bit better tomorrow.  The hallways seemed narrower than at past meetings, very crowded, and the site would benefit from more places to sit and have conversations.