APS March Meeting 2024, Day 3

My highlights today are a bit thin, because I was fortunate enough to spend time catching up with collaborators and old friends, but here goes:

• Pedram Roushan from Google gave an interesting talk about noisy intermediate-scale quantum experiments for simulation.  He showed some impressive data looking at the propagation of (simulated) magnons in the 1D Heisenberg spin chain.
• In the same session, Lieven Vandersypen from Delft presented their recent results using gate-defined Ge/SiGe quantum dot arrays to simulate a small-scale version of the Hubbard model.  Looking at exciton formation and propagation in a Hubbard ladder while being able to tune many parameters, the data are pretty neat, though I have to say it seems like scaling this up to large arrays will be extremely challenging in terms of layout and tuning.  He also showed some in-preparation work on spin propagation in similar arrays - neat.
• In a completely different session, Jacques Prost, recipient of this year's Onsager Prize, gave an interesting talk about broken symmetries and dynamics of living tissue.  This included cell motion driven by nematicity (living tissue as liquid crystal....) and how in a cylindrical environment this can lead to rotation of growing tissue.  These sorts of interactions in "active matter" can be related to how tissue grows and differentiates in living systems.
• My colleague Gustavo Scuseria is this year's recipient of the Aneesha Rahman Prize, and he gave a good explanation of his group's recent work on using dualities to map strongly correlated models onto more tractable (polynomial-growth rather than exponential growth in problem size) equivalent weakly correlated models.
• In a session on quantum spin liquids, Tyrel McQueen of Johns Hopkins spoke about two examples of his group's recent work.  Chemical substitution can help tune interactions in a Kitaev spin liquid candidate, and they've also examined the controlled interplay of charge density waves and magnetic order.  The talk did a great job of conveying a taste of the breadth and depth of the space of quantum magnets.
• Lastly, Chih-Yuan Lu, recipient of this year's George E. Pake Prize, gave a very nice historical overview of the development of semiconductor electronics from the integrated circuit to the present frontiers (of gate-all-around transistors and 3D integrated NAND memory).

Two other notes not directly germane to the APS meeting:

• The AAAS appropriations tracker shows how outlays for the coming year are shaping up for NSF and the other agencies.  </begin rant>Can someone explain to me why the conference NSF budget allocation for research ends up -8.5%, when the House pushed +0.3% and the Senate pushed -2.9%? Also, cutting the STEM education budget (which includes GRFP) by 28% seems terrible.  Griping about US STEM competitiveness and the need for developing the next-generation technical workforce, while simultaneously cutting research training resources:  Congress in action.   Once again, they feel good about supporting the authorization of doubling the NSF budget over five years, but don't actually want to appropriate the funds to do it.  </end rant>
• Purely by random chance (ahem), I want to point to this column.