It's hard to believe that it's already the end of 2023. It's been a busy year for condensed matter; it's unfortunate that two of the biggest stories (problems with high pressure superconductivity papers; the brief excitement about LK99, the not-actually-a-superconductor) were probably the field's highest profile events. Still, hopefully the latter at least had the effect of bringing to the public a little bit of the excitement and potential of how condensed matter and materials physics affects our lives. Physics World summarizes some of their picks for big materials-related stories of 2023 here. Similarly, here are Quanta's choices for biggest physics stories of the year, and these are the choices from the editors of APS's Physics.
It's been a busy year personally, with lots going on and too much proposal writing, but at least my blog posting was more frequent than in 2022. It's still surprising to me that I've been writing this since mid-2005, enough to see almost the entire lifecycle of blogging. Happy New Year to my readers, and if there are any particular topics about which you think I should write, please let me know in the comments. I'm always looking for CM/materials concepts that I can try to explain on a non-specialist accessible level. Still looking for the time and appealing perspective to write that popular book....
Anyway, I hope you have a very happy new year, and best wishes for a great 2024.
6 comments:
Happy new year from a frequent reader of your blog.
Happy New Year! I do hope you take the time to write that book: there are not many good popular texts on condensed matter. I'd love to see a CM equivalent of Philip Ball's tremendous "Self-Made Tapestry". What books I have come across in this niche are much further from the research frontier.
Happy new year from another avid reader!
Happy new years @Doug!
Your mention of the LK-99 story that captured everyone's attention seems timely, as I just saw this preprint pop-up seemingly trying to to keep the debate alive. Any thoughts if you've already seen and gone through it?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.00999
I'd be interested in your thoughts about two hot areas of research that date from around the time you started your blog: iron-based superconductors and molecular computing. Neither is as hot now as they once were, but are they still warm?
Thanks for the new year's wishes.
@Stefan, I'm very skeptical. The magnetization looks pretty ugly, and it would be helpful to have arrows on the figures to show the sense of the hysteresis loops. I haven't bothered to run numbers on the magnitude of the effect to see if it's some impurity phase vs. a good fraction of the sample.
@Charles, I think there is still a fair bit going on with Fe-based superconductors, though it seems like a lot of the attention in Fe-based compounds has gone toward kagome metals with flat bands. The hot SC areas right now seem to be nickelates and UTe2. As for molecular computing, do you mean molecular electronics in the sense of single molecule junctions? I can tell you that the hot area these days in non-CMOS computing is any and every flavor of "neuromorphic" devices based on systems with time-dependent/hysteretic response.
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