Ask me something.

I realized that I haven't had an open "ask me" post in almost two years.  Is there something in particular you'd like me to write about?  As we head into another academic year, are there matters of interest to (grad or undergrad) students?

Dark matter, one more time.

There is strong circumstantial evidence that there is some kind of matter in the universe that interacts with ordinary matter via gravity, but is otherwise not readily detected - it is very hard to explain things like the rotation rates of galaxies, the motion of star clusters, and features of the large scale structure of the universe without dark matter.   (The most discussed alternative would be some modification to gravity, but given the success of general relativity at explaining many things including gravitational radiation, this seems less and less likely.)  A favorite candidate for dark matter would be some as-yet undiscovered particle or class of particles that would have to be electrically neutral (dark!) and would only interact very weakly if at all beyond the gravitational attraction.

There have been many experiments trying to detect these particles directly.  The usual assumption is that these particles are all around us, and very occasionally they will interact with the nuclei of ordinary matter via some residual, weak mechanism (say higher order corrections to ordinary standard model physics).  The signature would be energy getting dumped into a nucleus without necessarily producing a bunch of charged particles.   So, you need a detector that can discriminate between nuclear recoils and charged particles.  You want a lot of material, to up the rate of any interactions, and yet the detector has to be sensitive enough to see a single event, and you need pure enough material and surroundings that a real signal wouldn't get swamped by background radiation, including that from impurities.  The leading detection approaches these days use sodium iodide scintillators (DAMA), solid blocks of germanium or silicon (CDMS), and liquid xenon (XENON, LUX, PandaX - see here for some useful discussion and links).

I've been blogging long enough now to have seen rumors about dark matter detection come and go.  See here and here.  Now in the last week both LUX and PandaX have reported their latest results, and they have found nothing - no candidate events at all - after their recent experimental runs.  This is in contrast to DAMA, who have been seeing some sort of signal for years that seems to vary with the seasons.  See here for some discussion.  The lack of any detection at all is interesting.  There's always the possibility that whatever dark matter exists really does only interact with ordinary matter via gravity - perhaps all other interactions are somehow suppressed by some symmetry.  Between the lack of dark matter particle detection and the apparent lack of exotica at the LHC so far, there is a lot of head scratching going on....

Impact factors and academic "moneyball"

For those who don't know the term:  Moneyball is the title of a book and a movie about the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team, a team with a payroll in the bottom 10% of major league baseball at the time.   They used a data-intensive, analytics-based strategy called sabermetrics to find "hidden value" and "market inefficiencies", to put together a very competitive team despite their very limited financial resources.   A recent (very fun if you're a baseball fan) book along the same lines is this one.  (It also has a wonderful discussion of confirmation bias!)

A couple of years ago there was a flurry of articles (like this one and the academic paper on which it was based) about whether a similar data-driven approach could be used in scientific academia - to predict success of individuals in research careers, perhaps to put together a better department or institute (a "roster") by getting a competitive edge at identifying likely successful researchers.

The central problems in trying to apply this philosophy to academia are the lack of really good metrics and the timescales involved in research careers.  Baseball is a paradise for people who love statistics.  The rules have been (largely) unchanged for over a hundred years; the seasons are very long (formerly 154 games, now 162), and in any game an everyday player can get multiple opportunities to show their offensive or defensive skills.   With modern tools it is possible to get quantitative information about every single pitched ball and batted ball.  As a result, the baseball stats community has come up with a huge number of quantitative metrics for evaluating performance in different aspects of the game, and they have a gigantic database against which to test their models.  They even have devised metrics to try and normalize out the effects of local environment (baseball park-neutral or adjusted stats).

Fig. 1, top panel, from this article.  x-axis = # of citations.
The mean of the distribution is strongly affected by the outliers.

In scientific research, there are very few metrics (publications; citation count; impact factor of the journals in which articles are published), and the total historical record available on which to base some evaluation of an early career researcher is practically the definition of what a baseball stats person would call "small sample size".   An article in Nature this week highlights the flaws with impact factor as a metric.  I've written before about this (here and here), pointing out that impact factor is a lousy statistic because it's dominated by outliers, and now I finally have a nice graph (fig. 1 in the article; top panel shown here) to illustrate this.  

So, in academia, the tantalizing fact is that there is almost certainly a lot of "hidden value" out there missed by traditional evaluation approaches.  Just relying on pedigree (where did so-and-so get their doctorate?) and high impact publications (person A must be better than person B because person A published a paper as a postdoc in a high impact glossy journal) almost certainly misses some people who could be outstanding researchers.  However, the lack of good metrics, the small sample sizes, the long timescales associated with research, and enormous local environmental influence (it's just easier to do cutting-edge work at Harvard than at Northern Michigan), all mean that it's incredibly hard to come up with a way to find these people via some analytic approach.  

Keeping your (samples) cool is not always easy.

Very often in condensed matter physics we like to do experiments on materials or devices in a cold environment.  As has been appreciated for more than a century, cooling materials down often makes them easier to understand, because at low temperatures there is not enough thermal energy bopping around to drive complicated processes.  There are fewer lattice vibrations.  Electrons settle down more into their lowest available states.  The spread in available electron energies is proportional to \(k_{\mathrm{B}}T\), so any electronic measurement as a function of energy gets sharper-looking at low temperatures.

Sometimes, though, you have to dump energy into the system to do the study you care about.  If you want to measure electronic conduction, you have to apply some voltage \(V\) across your sample to drive a current \(I\), and that \(I \times V\) power shows up as heat.  In our case, we have done work over the last few years trying to do simultaneous electronic measurements and optical spectroscopy on metal junctions containing one or a few molecules (see here).   What we are striving toward is doing inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (IETS - see here) at the same time as molecular-scale Raman spectroscopy (see here for example).   The tricky bit is that IETS works best at really low temperatures (say 4.2 K), where the electronic energy spread is small (hundreds of microvolts), but the optical spectroscopy works best when the structure is illuminated by a couple of mW of laser power focused into a ~ 1.5 micron diameter spot.

It turns out that the amount of heating you get when you illuminate a thin metal wire (which can be detected in various ways; for example, we can use the temperature-dependent electrical resistance of the wire itself as a thermometer) isn't too bad when the sample starts out at, say, 100 K.  If the sample/substrate starts out at about 5 K, however, even modest incident laser power directly on the sample can heat the metal wire by tens of Kelvin, as we show in a new paper.  How the local temperature changes with incident laser intensity is rather complicated, and we find that we can model this well if the main roadblock at low temperatures is the acoustic mismatch thermal boundary resistance.  This is a neat effect discussed in detail here.  Vibrational heat transfer between the metal and the underlying insulating substrate is hampered (like \(1/T^3\) at low temperatures) by the fact that the speed of sound is very different between the metal and the insulator.   There are a bunch of other complicated issues (this and this, for example) that can also hinder heat flow in nanostructures, but the acoustic mismatch appears to be the dominant one in our case.   The bottom line:  staying cool in the spotlight is hard.  We are working away on some ideas on mitigating this issue.  Fun stuff.

(Note:  I'm doing some travel, so posting will slow down for a bit.)

The critical material nearly everyone overlooks

Condensed matter physics is tough to popularize, and yet aspects of it are absolutely ubiquitous in modern technologies.  For example:  Nearly every flat panel display, from the one on your phone to your computer monitor to your large television, takes advantage of an underappreciated triumph of materials development, a transparent conducting layer.  Usually, when a material is a good conductor of electricity, it tends to be (when more than tens of nm thick) reflective and opaque.   Remember, light is an electromagnetic wave.  If the electric field from the light can make the mobile charge in the material move, and if that charge can keep up with the rapid oscillations (10¹⁴ Hz and faster!) of the electric field, then the light tends to be reflected rather than transmitted.  This is why polished aluminum or silver can be used as a mirror.

The dominant technology for transparent conductors is indium tin oxide (ITO), which manages to thread between two constraints.  It's a highly doped semiconductor.  The undoped indium oxide material has a band gap of 3 eV, meaning that violet light with a shorter wavelength than about 350 nm will have enough energy to be absorbed, by kicking electrons out of the filled valence band and into the conduction band.  Longer wavelength light (most of the visible spectrum) doesn't have enough energy to make those transitions, and thus the material is transparent for those colors.   ITO has had enough tin added to make the resulting material fairly conducting at low frequencies (say those relevant for electronics, but much lower than the frequency of visible light).  However, because of the way charge moves in ITO (see here or here for a nice article), it does not act reflective at visible frequencies.   This material is one huge enabling technology for displays!  I remember being told that the upper limit on LCD display size was, at one point, limited by the electrical conductivity of the ITO, and that we'd never have flat screens bigger than about a meter diagonal.  Clearly that problem was resolved.

Indium isn't cheap.  There are many people interested in making cheaper (yet still reasonably transparent) conducting layers.  Possibilities include graphene (though even at monolayer thickness it does absorb about 2% in the visible) and percolative networks of metal nanowires (or nanotubes).    Unfortunately, because of the physics described above, it would appear that transparent aluminum  (in the sense of having true bulk metal-like properties but optical transparency in the visible) must remain in the realm of science fiction.

Short items

Here are a few items:

• This is fantastic.  Eric Schlaepfer, a hardware engineer at Google, has built a "disintegrated circuit", making a 6502 processor (the CPU from the Apple II and also used in one of my favorite undergrad courses back when I took it) out of surface-mount transistors.  It can't run at MHz clock speeds because of the stray capacitance of the traces on the circuit board, but it's still amazing.  If you want a metric for modern processors, if you made a version of the processor for the iPad Air 2, it would cover 82000 m².
• This is a bit "meta", but here is Peter Woit's recent Quick Items link.  I've steered clear from the whole multiverse discussion, but wow, I find it very disturbing how much recent mass publicity has been given to an idea that is described, at best, as an extremely speculative notion.  It's like having Bayesian arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
• Speaking of absurdist speculative garbage, Michio Kaku in recent days has claimed that we will shortly be able to create avatars that will live after us based on uploaded memories, and that we are living in The Matrix, which proves the existence of God.   How has this person become one of the well-known faces of science popularization?
• American Ninja Warrior really is a good way to illustrate some fun physics.
• Geekwrapped has highlighted this blog as one of the 20 best science blogs out there.  Thanks!

Frontiers in Quantum Materials and Devices 2016 - day 2

Continuing with my very brief (and necessarily incomplete) summary of the FQMD 2016 meeting at RIKEN at the beginning of this week:

• Eric Heller of Harvard gave a very interesting and provocative talk about two topics, Raman scattering in graphene and then the onset of optical absorption in semiconductors.  Regarding the former (see here), he makes a strong case that the "double resonance" theoretical treatment of Raman scattering in graphene that has been highly cited since 2000 is not the right way to think about the problem.  Rather, one should use the Kramers-Heisenberg-Dirac theory of Raman scattering c. 1925-27, and keep in mind the important role played by (crystal) momentum conservation, as explained in the paper linked above.   Regarding the latter topic, he went on to argue (persuasively, in my view) that the textbook approach (literally - I described it in my own book) to the onset of optical absorption in direct-gap semiconductors as the photon energy exceeds the band gap is incomplete and gets the functional dependence on frequency wrong.  This work isn't published yet, and it wouldn't be appropriate for me to present his argument before he does, but I will definitely be keeping an eye out for this.
• Denis Maryenko of RIKEN spoke about measurements of the anomalous Hall effect in the 2d electron gas that is present at the interface between ZnO and MnZnO.  This system is pretty impressive, with disorder so small that it supports very clean fractional quantum Hall effect, but with larger Coulomb and Zeeman energies than the more traditional GaAs/AlGaAs interface because of the different dielectric functions and g factors, respectively of the ZnO system.   Interesting (not yet published) magnetic physics appears to be taking place at the interface due apparently to point defects that support unpaired spins.
• Pertti Hakonen from Aalto presented a nice talk about the quantum Hall effect in suspended graphene.  They have (not yet published) measurements in suspended structures made in the Corbino geometry, where there is an electrode in the center of a disk, and a second contact around the disk's perimeter.  As you might imagine, making a structure like that where the graphene disk is suspended in space, yet there is a nice contact to the central electrode without disrupting the disk, is quite a fabrication tour de force, based on an approach from here.
• Vincent Bouchiat from CNRS, Grenoble talked about using tin-decorated graphene as a system to explore the nature of the superconductor-insulator transition.  It's a flexible material system, in that you can control the coverage of the tin (the size and distribution of tin islands), the disorder in the graphene via damage, and the carrier density in the graphene via electrostatic gating.   An earlier paper is here, and a more recent one is here.
• Steven Richardson of Howard University spoke about the challenges of trying to make germanene, the germanium analog to graphene.  One approach that has been used in graphene growth has been to start with small, polycyclic carbon ring molecules as seeds.  Doing this in germanium has proven difficult, and Prof. Richardson's group does quantum chemistry calculations with DFT to establish the relative energetic stability and properties of candidate molecules.  From his talk I learned something I had not appreciated, that treating dispersion forces (van der Waals interactions) in DFT is really nontrivial.  
• James Analytis of Berkeley gave a very nice talk about Weyl fermions, where I actually felt like I had a grasp of this for a few minutes.  Up to now, most of the experiments on materials that are supposed to support Weyl-like band structure have been based on photoemission, rather than actual transport.  Prof. Analytis showed particular transport signatures (quantum oscillations of resistance as a function of magnetic field) that are consistent with what one would expect from electrons actually tracing out Weyl-expected trajectories (in both real space and reciprocal space).  This work relies on impressive nanofabrication, where a focused ion beam is used to carve Cd₃As₂ into nanostructures + leads without killing the material quality.
• Yoshinori Tokura from RIKEN surveyed his group's results looking at the interplay of magnetism, the quantum Hall effect, and the quantum anomalous Hall effect, built on high quality epitaxial structures based on a topological insulator (Bi_1-xSb_x)₂Te₃ and its Cr-doped relative.  Relevant papers are here, here, and here.   This is a great example of how much scientific activity can spring forth when it becomes possible to grow a new material system with very high quality.
• Jagadeesh Moodera from MIT presented work that is similar in spirit, involving Cr doping of Bi₂Se₃, and then V doping of Sb₂Te₃.  In systems like this it is possible to see robust, ballistic transport via chiral edge states over millimeters.  Again, excellent material quality + interesting choices of materials = impressive science.
• Joe Checkelsky of MIT spoke about exploring electronic materials with magnetically frustrated lattices.  Many systems with magnetic frustration (where magnetic moments at different lattice sites have competing interactions so that it's not possible to satisfy all of them) are insulators.  In conducting versions of these systems, there can be really funky effects where the magnetic states interact with the electrons through mechanisms like Berry curvature.  This work is in press right now and I will come back and update this once it's available online.
• Hajime Okamoto from NTT gave a neat talk about optomechanical effects (see here for a review) - where photogenerated carriers in an AlGaAs/GaAs cantilever can couple (via the piezoelectric properties of the material) to the mechanical oscillations of the cantilever.  This makes it possible to do an interesting kind of optical driving and optical cooling of such structures.   See here and here, for example.

Whew.  Overall, a fun, interesting, and dense two days!

Frontiers in Quantum Materials and Devices 2016 - day 1

There were a number of really interesting talks at the Harvard/MIT sponsored, RIKEN-co-sponsored FQMD workshop this week.   I'm very grateful for the invitation to come and present.  It was a very dense two days!  I have to be a bit careful in what I write, given that some of the work is not yet published.  Here are some highlights.  I'll try to use links to the arxiv versions of the papers so that people without paid access can see them.

• Ania Bleszynski-Jayich of UCSB spoke about her group's impressive nanoscale magnetic imaging using single nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond AFM tips.   The N-V centers are defects in the diamond lattice, where a N atom is substituted for a C atom, directly adjacent to a C-atom vacancy.  These defects play host to a single unpaired electronic spin and can be probed through optically detected magnetic resonance.  Brendan Shields at Basel gave a talk later in the day on this technique as well - impressive imaging of domains in antiferromagnetic (!) structures.
• Naoto Nagaosa of RIKEN gave an overview of his group's work on nonlinear and nonreciprocal electronic and optical responses in special (topological) materials - see here, here, and here for examples.  The last of these is an example where because of funky topological band structure, you can have a material that is rectifying (resistance \( R(I) \neq R(-I)\) ) where the rectification is controlled by a magnetic field.
• Dylan Maher of Bristol, most recently in the spotlight for cool quantum optics work with Aephraim Steinberg, gave a great overview of the impressive integrated photonics capabilities at Bristol - see here, here, and here. 
• Satoshi Iwamoto of Tokyo showed some neat results involving 3d chiral photonic materials (that is, materials with optical helicity built into their structure).  The wild thing here is that these materials in particular are constructed by manually stacking (!) individual nanoscale-thickness layers, using manipulation within an electron microscope - see here for an example.
• Jason Petta from Princeton presented some really technically beautiful work involving SiGe quantum dots coupled to (and via) superconducting resonators.  These are gate-defined dots, where metal electrodes are used as capacitor electrodes to "suck in" and confine electrons.  It's hard to explain to a non-expert just how technically impressive the multiple gate structures are that they've developed.  See here.   Figure 1 just doesn't do it justice.
• Makoto Kohda of Tohoku spoke very clearly about spin-orbit effects in GaAs 2d electron gas and in the layered semiconductor GaSe.  He showed very cool stuff - this paper showing coherent motion and precession of spin over long distances, and gate-controlled switching between weak localization and weak antilocalization in tape-exfoliated GaSe.
• Bill Wilson, executive director of Harvard's CNS, gave an overview of their nanofab facility.  Truly, it is amazing how much internal investment Harvard has made in that facility, and I'm not even talking about the construction of the building itself.  It's very hard not to be jealous.  As often comes up when talking about Harvard, we again see that having a $40B endowment simply makes many problems faced by mere mortals simply evaporate.

Quantum materials workshop followup and preview

At the beginning of last month, the Rice Center for Quantum Materials hosted a workshop "Interacting Quantum Systems Driven Out of Equilibrium", which I reported here and here.  As promised, the slides from the talks are now available here if you click on the names of the speakers.

I am currently attending this workshop at RIKEN, sponsored by the Harvard/MIT NSF-supported Center for Integrated Quantum Materials.  I will be posting a limited summary of this workshop as well, once I recover from jet lag.

The 2016 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience

Every two years the Kavli Foundation awards three large scientific prizes, in astrophysics, neuroscience, and nanoscience.  This year's nanoscience prize goes to Gerd Binnig, Christoph Gerber, and Cal Quate, for the invention and development of the atomic force microscope (AFM).

The AFM is a great example of one of those inventions that seems elegant and simple, yet could only come into being after the stage had been set through the development of several other enabling technologies.  (My former faculty colleague Prof. Cyrus Mody does an excellent job telling this story in his book, which I heartily recommend.)

The atomic force microscope idea is very simple in concept.  Take a very sharp stylus on a flexible cantilevered arm, and scan it in a controlled way over a surface.  If the stylus tip is actually in contact with the sample surface, changes in surface topography will be detectable through the deflection of the cantilever, which can be measured optically (e.g. deflection of a laser) or by other means (e.g., changes in the electrical resistance of the cantilever as it is strained).  This is basically an extrapolation to the very small scale of the profilometer.  Alternately, you don't need the tip to be in hard contact with the surface - it just needs to get close enough to detect the short-range forces between the tip atoms and the surface.  Oscillating the cantilever/tip up and down at or near its tuning-fork-like mechanical resonance can give you benefits in terms of detection sensitivity.  Unlike STM, AFM has the benefit of working on insulating surfaces.

To implement this requires a number of building blocks:  fabrication of tips with nm-scale sharpness; precise (nm-scale or better) control at the nanoscale of the tip position relative to the sample; computerized data acquisition to map out the tip response as a function of tip position.  These are similar to the necessary requirements for scanning tunneling microscopy, and it is no coincidence that Binnig was associated with STM as well.  Widespread adoption of AFM (as discussed in Mody's book) required these building blocks to be widely available.

AFM has turned out to be incredibly versatile.  These devices can be used to measure extremely tiny local forces.  Once you know the topography, you can withdraw the tip a little, scan back over the surface and measure longer-ranged forces (electrostatics, magnetic forces if you have a magnetic tip).  Lateral deflection of the tip can tell you about frictional interactions between the tip and the sample.  A conducting tip may be used as a local potentiometer, or as a scanning "gate" electrode.  Functionalizing the tip and high frequency techniques have enabled AFM to image surfaces and even molecular orbitals with better-than-atomic resolution.  AFM has been an incredible enabling technology with utility far beyond the original vision of its pioneers.  That's exactly the kind of achievement that big prizes are meant to recognize.

Journal costs - what's the answer?

Sorry for the brief break in posting - real life obligations sometimes make it tough to blog as frequently as I would like.

The Nature Publishing Group is going to launch another five journals this year.  University library subscription costs for each of these are going to be around $5K/yr.   Other journal publishers are making similar moves - the ACS has launched three new journals this year, including an open access journal that sounds like it's meant to be a direct competitor to NPG's Scientific Reports.

On the one hand, these journals wouldn't be launched if publishers didn't think they could at least break even, meaning that someone somewhere has done a marketing study suggesting that there is sufficient demand out there both from authors and would-be subscribers.  On the other hand, it's hard for me to believe that the market can really sustain continuous growth in the number of journals, especially when this implies a similar growth in the number of requests to review papers (for free of course) from all of these editorial boards.  

What is the endpoint of this proliferation of journals, especially when many university library budgets simply make it impossible for those schools to pay for institutional subscriptions, and the pool of qualified reviewers is not similarly expanding?  In the long term, it seems like services like the arxiv have to win, perhaps with some kind of post-publication review/commentary.  However, the reward structures in place (i.e., the emphasis on particular "high impact" journal publications in hiring and promotion) put in place a huge barrier to change in that direction.  This is another area where I worry about the inevitability of a greater bifurcation into "have" and "have not" institutions, something that has a certain internal consistency but is probably long-term bad for creativity in research.

Research blogging: Magnetism in layered materials

Following on from graphene, there has been enormous interest in other layered materials for the last few years, such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) like MoS₂.   Depending on the constituents and particular structure, these materials can be semiconductors, superconductors, charge density wave compounds, etc., and can have properties that vary strongly as the number of layers in the material is reduced toward one.  You can expand the palette further by substitutionally doping different elements into the chalcogenide layers, or you can intercalate other atoms between the layers.  There are a huge number of possible compounds and variations.  (Fun note:  TMDs have been studied intensely before.  See here for a review from almost 50 years ago!  And magnetism in intercalated TMDs was examined by people like Stuart Parkin and Richard Friend almost 40 years ago.   The resurgence now is due to a combination of improved growth and characterization techniques, interest in low-dimensionality materials, and theoretical appreciation for the richness of possible states in these systems.)

Recently, collaborating with my colleague Jun Lou, we had some fun examining a related material, V₅S₈, which you can also think of as (V_0.25)VS₂.  There are vanadium disulfide layers, and intercalated between them are additional vanadium atoms in an ordered pattern.  The bulk version of this material was found in the 1970s to be an antiferromagnet - below the Neel temperature T_N ~ 32 K, the spins of the unpaired electrons on the intercalated vanadium atoms spontaneously order into the arrangement shown in the upper panel at right.   If an external magnetic field bigger than about 4 T is applied perpendicular to the planes of the material, the spins flop over into the arrangement shown in the bottom panel - this is called a spin flop transition. 

Prof. Lou's group has figured out how to grow V₅S₈ by chemical vapor deposition, so that we were able to make measurements on single crystals of a variety of thicknesses, down to about 10 nm.  We found a couple of cool things, as reported here.   

First, we found a previously unreported first-order (in the thicker crystals) phase transition as a function of externally applied magnetic field.   The signature of this is hysteresis in the electrical resistance of the material as a function of the magnetic field, H.  Just below T_N, the hysteresis appears near zero magnetic field.  As T is lowered, the magnetic field where the hysteresis takes place increases dramatically - in a thick crystal, it can go from basically 0 T to taking place at 9 T when the temperature is lowered by only three Kelvin!  Indeed, that's probably one reason why the transition was missed by previous investigators:  If you take data at only select temperatures, you could easily miss the whole thing.   This kind of a transition is called metamagnetic, and we think that large applied fields kill the antiferromagnetism (AFM), driving the material into a paramagnetic (PM) state.  We suggest a phase diagram shown in the table-of-contents figure shown here.  The transition extrapolates to a finite value of H at zero temperature.  That implies that it ends up as a quantum phase transition.

Second, we found that there are systematic changes in the magnetic properties as a function of the thickness of the crystals.  In thinner crystals, the antiferromagnetism appears to be weaker, with T_N falling.  Moreover, the hysteresis in the field-driven transition vanishes in thinner crystals, suggesting that the metamagnetic transition goes from first-order to second order in the thin limit.   

This work was a lot of fun.  As far as I know, it's the first example of a systematic study of magnetic properties in one of these layered materials as a function of material thickness.  I think we've just scratched the surface in terms of what could be possible in terms of magnetism in this layered material platform. 

Interacting Quantum Systems Driven Out of Equilibrium - day 2

Continuing into day 2 of our workshop:

• Bryce Gadway of the University of Illinois spoke about using cold atoms in an optical lattice to simulate topological and disordered systems.  His group has implemented an optical lattice constructed not by interference of retroreflected lasers, but by interference between a laser and counterpropagating beams frequency shifted by precise, controlled amounts.  As a non-atomic physics person I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but the point is that this allows his group to put in place precise control of the on-site potential of each lattice site and to dial in designer phase shifts associated with tunneling between adjacent sites, on demand.  This means it is possible to study transport problems (like Bloch oscillations) as well as introducing designer, time-varying, site-specific disorder if desired.  
• I spoke about my group's work on heating and dissipation in atomic- and molecular-scale junctions driven out of equilibrium (and into a steady state) by electronic bias.  I framed the discussion in terms of how hard it is to obtain truly local information about vibrational and electronic distributions in such driven systems.  On the vibration side, if you're interested, I suggest looking here, here, and here, with a recent related result here.  On the electronic front, I talked about published (here and here) and some unpublished data looking at electronic shot noise at high biases in atomic-scale metal junctions.  
• Eugene Demler from Harvard (my grad school classmate) gave a nice talk that addressed nonequilibrium aspects of both cold atoms and electrons.   For example, he and collaborators have developed some theoretical machinery for looking at a cold atom version of the orthogonality catastrophe - what happens if you suddenly "turn on" interactions between a cold Fermi gas and a single impurity, and watch the dynamics.  These same theoretical techniques can be applied to solid state systems as well.  (This is just a subset of what was presented.)
• Ryo Shimano from Tokyo University gave a very pretty talk about optical manipulation and driving of the Higgs mode inside superconductors.  You can hit a superconductor with THz radiation as a pump, and then probe at some delay with additional THz radiation.  If the pump is at the right frequency (energy half the superconducting gap, in the s-wave case), you can excite collective sloshing of the condensate (see here and scroll down to the first example).  As you might imagine, things get more rich and complicated with more exotic superconductors (multiband or unconventional).
• Emil Yuzbashyan from Rutgers presented a look at the fundamental issues involved in non-thermal steady states of ensembles of quantum particles at long times after a quench (a sudden change in some parameter).  As I wrote in the first-day discussion, the interesting question here is when does the system evolve seemingly coherently (i.e., the particles slosh around in recurring patterns, just as a Newton's cradle ticks back and forth), and when does the system instead tend toward a long-time state that looks like a randomized, thermalized condition?   To see how this relates to classical mechanics, see these articles (here and here) that I need to find time to read.  
• Lastly, my colleague Matt Foster from Rice spoke about quenched BCS superfluids, topology, spectral probes, and gapless (topological) superconductivity under intense THz pumping.  This was a neat pedagogical talk about this work.  It touches some of the same issues as the Shimano talk above.  One aspect that I found interesting to consider:  You can have a system where a quench drives some collective oscillations, and those collective oscillations act as a Floquet perturbation, changing the effective band structure and giving rise to nonlinearities that continue the oscillations.  Wild stuff - here are the slides.  

We then had a lunch that segued smoothly into a relaxed poster session for students and postdocs.  Overall, it was a great workshop and a good chance to get people from diverse areas of CM and AMO physics together over common interests in nonequilibrium response of quantum systems.  Thanks to everyone who was able to come, to our staff organizer who made everything actually come together, and of course to our sponsors (NSF DMR, ICAM-I2CAM, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Lakeshore, Advantest, and Coherent)!

Interacting Quantum Systems Driven Out of Equilibrium - day 1 (updated - complete)

Our workshop was fun and interesting.   There are multiple ways to drive physical systems out of equilibrium - you can take some system and push on it with some force, for example.  In the case of a condensed matter system (whether solid state or trapped cold atoms), you can apply a bias - some difference in population (or chemical potential or pressure) that drives the system, either by adding kinetic energy to it or encouraging the flow of matter and/or charge.  You can apply a temperature difference across the system, driving some average flow of energy through the system's degrees of freedom.  You can shine light on the system, adding energy and momentum either at a steady rate or in a sudden pulse.  One favorite piece of vocabulary these days is a quench - suddenly (compared with relaxation rates of the system) changing some condition like the potential energy of the particles, and then watching the response of the system's degrees of freedom.  Does the system "thermalize"?  That is, do the microscopic pieces of the system interact with each other and redistribute energy so that there seems to be some effective temperature?  Or does the system fail to thermalize, and instead slosh around in some non-thermal configuration for a long time?  There are many open issues.

We had 13 talks on the first day, and I don't want to write exhaustive summaries of all of them.  We will eventually be posting pdf files of the relevant slides.  That being said, I will give a super-brief description of each, and link to a relevant paper or two so that you can see what was discussed.  Here are the 13 talks we had on the first day.

• Nadya Mason from UIUC spoke about her group's work on engineered superconducting/normal metal structures in magnetic fields.  These devices allow studies of current-driven motion of trapped magnetic flux.  In some sense this is an old, established problem, but traditional models actually do a poor job of reproducing the experimental data.  The experiments are here, and it looks like it's important to include some "delayed friction" to understand vortex motion.
• Jonathan Bird from Buffalo spoke about his group's studies of quantum point contacts in semiconductors, where it's long been known how to measure electronic conduction down to the limit of discrete quantum channels, where the devices act like waveguides for the electrons.   His group has developed some high speed techniques for making sub-ns electronic measurements, and what really gets interesting is when systems are driven hard, so that the electronic bias is the largest energy scale in the problem - you have to worry quite a bit about exciting phonons and what they do.  A key result is the apparent formation of a specific, somewhat heating-immune transport mode when such a point contact is driven really hard.
• David Goldhaber-Gordon from Stanford spoke about his group's recent experiments looking at quantum dots, some building on work looking at the so-called two-channel Kondo effect.  An unpaired electron is placed in the position of trying to couple to two (carefully tuned to be) independent baths of electrons.  Some of the not-yet-published results look at interesting scaling as one tunes through the accessible regimes, and involved some stunningly pretty device fabrication done at the Weizmann Institute.  Other experiments looked at the apparent emergence of symmetry in systems comprising two quantum dots.
• Tilman Esslinger of ETH presented his group's great work on using cold atoms to look at systems rather analogous to the ones Prof. Bird had mentioned.  They can create blobs of fermionic cold atom fluids of unequal populations, and link them by a carefully controlled constriction, and then they can image transport.  If they squeeze the contact to be effectively one dimensional, they can see quantized conductance of atoms (just as solid state folks can do with charge in a quantum point contact).  They can use atomic physics methods to dial around the interactions between the particles, and can then look at how this affects dissipation in the out of equilibrium situation.  Gorgeous stuff.
• Takashi Oka of the Max Planck Institutes in Dresden talked about Floquet theory and using lasers to control the topology of the band structure of materials.  There was a lot to this talk, and it's not easy to summarize.  In Floquet theory, you apply a periodic driving potential to a quantum system.  Just like a spatially periodic potential energy picks out certain spatial periodicities and gives you a compact way of looking at band structure, temporal periodicity creates what you could call replicas of the band structure but shifted in energy by multiples of \( \hbar \omega\), where \(\omega\) is the driving frequency.  If you do this right, the driven system can have topological edge states.  You can also use periodic driving to reorient the magnetization of materials as if you had a whopping huge effective magnetic field.
• Andrew Millis of Columbia University has worked on many relevant topics, and in this case chose to speak about theory he and collaborators have done regarding a recent experiment looking at vanadium dioxide.  That material has a structural phase transition at 65 C that separates a low temperature, monoclinic, insulating state from a high temperature, tetragonal, metallic state.  In the experiment, optical excitation puts the material into a metallic state without actually leaving the monoclinic crystal structure.  The theory suggests that this is a correlation effect - scoop electrons out of the lower Hubbard band and drop them into the upper band, and interorbital interaction effects can stabilize a new, metastable electronic structure that's a metal.
• Alessandra Lanzara of Berkeley gave a really nice talk about her group's work on time-resolved angle-resolved photoemission.  You hit a material of interest with an ultrafast, time-resolved pump pulse of near-infrared light (1.5 eV photons), and then at some known delay you smack the system with a 6 eV probe pulse at a particular polarization and orientation, and measure the energy and momentum distribution of the electrons that get kicked out.  This lets you measure the transient electronic structure.  They've been able to use this approach to study the dynamics of quasiparticles in cuprate superconductors, how Cooper pairs respond to such pumping, etc.
• N. Peter Armitage at Johns Hopkins articulated nicely three reasons to "go nonequilibrium":  to learn about elementary excitations of an equilibrium phase; to access "phases" not possible in equilibrium material configurations; and to look for new "phases" that have no equilibrium analog.  He then gave a fun talk about using optical spectroscopy techniques to look at many-body relaxations (older paper here) in the Coulomb glass phase of lightly doped semiconductors - when there are strongly interacting, localized electrons in a disordered configuration so that screening is poor.  Interestingly, these systems relax more slowly when the carrier densities get higher, in physics related to the orthogonality catastrophe. 
• My faculty colleague Jun Kono from Rice spoke about so-called Dicke phenomena (such as superradiance, superfluorescence) in semiconductors.  These effects are great examples of nonequilibrium physics, when a driven system (say a semiconductor in a magnetic field illuminated by THz radiation that spans the energy scale of the cyclotron resonance, \(\omega_{\mathrm{c}} = e B/m^{*}\)) spontaneously develops coherence among the many electron-hole excitations in the system.  You can put such a system in a clever kind of 1d optical cavity, and approach the "strong coupling" regime so that the energetic coupling between the charge carriers and the photons in the cavity is comparable to the cyclotron energy.
• Christof Weitenberg from Hamburg then spoke about exciting results in simulating condensed matter systems using cold atoms in optical lattices.  One piece of physics that's very in vogue right now because of the rise of topology and various 2d materials is Berry curvature.  It's hard to explain this in brief - if you look at how the energy bands of a material as a function of crystal momentum \(E(\mathbf{k})\) are curved, the wavefunction of a particle traversing some closed trajectory in \(\mathbf{k}\)-space can pick up a phase factor related to that curvature.  In Weitenberg's experiments, cleverly arranged laser beams can create designer lattices.  Shaking the lasers periodically as a function of time can lead to the same Floquet physics discussed above, changing the effective band structure for atoms confined in those lattices, and through cool imaging techniques the experimentalists can reconstruct the Berry curvature that they have designed into that effective band structure.
• Another colleague Kaden Hazzard from Rice gave a nice theoretical talk about different nonequilibrium collective phenomena in ultracold atomic matter.  One aspect involved dilute molecules with electric dipoles (KBr) trapped in an optical lattice.  Because of their dipole moments, the molecules interact with each other over long ranges (dipole-dipole interactions scale like \(1/r^{3}\)), and their relaxation after getting dinged is governed by many-body interaction effects.  Another system is trapped Rydberg atoms, where dipolar interactions scale like the principal quantum number to the eleventh power (!).  
• Andrea Cavalleri from the Max Planck in Hamburg (and also spending time at Oxford) spoke about his group's very high profile work that I've already described here.  The central question here is really can driving a quantum material stabilize collective states like superconductivity that have coherence, correlations, and remarkable physical properties that would be absent without the drive.  Both Cavalleri and Oka made reference to this video, which shows how driving a classical pendulum can render the inverted position of the pendulum stable.  The experiments themselves are truly remarkable.
• In the last talk of Day 1, Sarang Gopalakrishnan of Cal Tech gave a theory talk again examining the response of driven many-body quantum systems, focusing particularly on the issue of many-body localization.  That is, when do the quantum dynamics of a many-body system lead to a real breakdown of quantum ergodicity, so that the degrees of freedom get "stuck", having large variability of local observables (instead of things being smoothed out and looking thermally smeared) and comparatively weak entanglement (which grows more slowly with system size than in the effectively thermal case).  He pointed out experimental challenges, that experiments probe dynamics rather than quantum eigenstates and that everything really is coupled (however weakly) to some thermal "bath", but argued that these issues aren't fatal to the interesting physics.

Updates coming - Interacting Quantum Systems Driven Out of Equilibrium

As I'd advertised, the Rice Center for Quantum Materials is hosting a two-day workshop on interacting quantum systems driven out of equilibrium.  This event brings together people from roughly three different perspectives:  people who worry about (solid state) systems driven out of equilibrium by electrical bias; people who worry about quantum systems driven out of equilibrium by light (often ultrafast and/or very intense); and people who leverage the amazing cleanliness and tunability of cold atom systems to examine driven quantum many-body systems.   I've been taking notes, and after the workshop wraps up today I'll post some highlights.

Technical help question: Quantum Design magnet power supplies

I'd like to ask my readers that own Quantum Design PPMS or MPMS instruments for help regarding a technical glitch.  My aging PPMS superconducting magnet power supply (the kind QD calls the H-plate version) has developed a problem.  For high fields (say above 7 T) the power supply fails to properly put the magnet in persistent mode and throws up an error in the control software.  After talking with QD, it seems like options are limited.  They no longer service this model of power supply, and therefore one option would be to buy a new one.  However, I have a sense that other people have dealt with this issue before, and I would feel dumb buying a new supply if the answer was that this is a known issue involving a $ 0.30 diode or something.  Without a schematic it's difficult to do diagnostics ourselves.  Has anyone out there seen this issue and knows how to correct it?

Oxide interfaces for fun and profit

The so-called III-V semiconductors, compounds that combine a group III element (Al, Ga, In) and a group V element (N, As, P, Sb), are mainstays of (opto)electronic devices and condensed matter physics.  They have never taken over for Si in logic and memory like some thought they might, for a number of materials science and economic reasons.  (To paraphrase an old line, "GaAs is the material of the future [for logic] and always will be.")  However, they are tremendously useful, in part because they are (now) fortuitously easy to grow - many of the compounds prefer the diamond-like "zinc blende" structure, and it is possible to prepare atomically sharp, flat, abrupt interfaces between materials with quite different semiconducting properties (very different band gaps and energetic alignments relative to each other).  Fundamentally, though, the palette is limited - these materials are very conventional semiconductors, without exhibiting other potentially exciting properties or competing phases like ferroelectricity, magnetism, superconductivity, etc.

Enter oxides.  Various complex oxides can exhibit all of these properties, and that has led to a concerted effort to develop materials growth techniques to create high quality oxide thin films, with an eye toward creating the same kind of atomically sharp heterointerfaces as in III-Vs.  A foundational paper is this one by Ohtomo and Hwang, where they used pulsed laser deposition to produce a heterojunction between LaAlO₃, an insulating transparent oxide, and SrTiO₃, another insulating transparent oxide (though one known to be almost a ferroelectric).  Despite the fact that both of those parent constituents are band insulators, the interface between the two was found to play host to a two-dimensional gas of electrons with remarkable properties.  The wikipedia article linked above is pretty good, so you should read it if you're interested.   

When you think about it, this is really remarkable.  You take an insulator, and another insulator, and yet the interface between them acts like a metal.  Where did the charge carriers come from?  (It's complicated - charge transfer from LAO to STO, but the free surface of the LAO and its chemical termination is hugely important.)  What is happening right at that interface?  (It's complicated.  There can be some lattice distortion from the growth process. There can be oxygen vacancies and other kinds of defects.  Below about 105 K the STO substrate distorts "ferroelastically", further complicating matters.)   Do the charge carriers live more on one side of the interface than the other, as in III-V interfaces, where the (conduction) band offset between the two layers can act like a potential barrier, and the same charge transfer that spills electrons onto one side leads to a self-consistent electrostatic potential that holds the charge layer right against that interface?  (Yes.)

Even just looking at the LAO/STO system, there is a ton of exciting work being performed.  Directly relevant to the meeting I just attended, Jeremy Levy's group at Pitt has been at the forefront of creating nanoscale electronic structures at the LAO/STO interface and examining their properties.  It turns out (one of these fortunate things!) that you can use a conductive atomic force microscope tip to do (reversible) electrochemistry at the free LAO surface, and basically draw conductive structures with nm resolution at the buried LAO/STO interface right below.   This is a very powerful technique, and it's enabled the study of the basic science of electronic transport at this interface at the nanoscale.

Beyond LAO/STO, over the same period there has been great progress in complex oxide materials growth by groups at a number of universities and at national labs.  I will refrain from trying to list them since I don't know them all and don't want to offend with the sin of inadvertent omission.  It is now possible to prepare a dizzying array of material types (ferromagnetic insulators like GdTiO₃; antiferromagnetic insulators like SmTiO₃; Mott insulators like LaTiO₃; nickelates; superconducting cuprates; etc.) and complicated multilayers and superlattices of these systems.   It's far too early to say where this is all going, but historically the ability to grow new material systems of high quality with excellent precision tends to pay big dividends in the long term, even if they're not the benefits originally envisioned.

The Pittsburgh Quantum Institute: PQI2016 - Quantum Challenges

For the last 2.5 days I've been at the PQI2016:  Quantum Challenges symposium.  It's been a very fun meeting, bringing together talks spanning physical chemistry, 2d materials, semiconductor and oxide structures, magnetic systems, plasmonics, cold atoms, and quantum information.  Since the talks are all going to end up streamable online from the PQI website, I'll highlight just a couple of things that I learned rather than trying to summarize everything.

• If you can make a material such that the dielectric permittivity \( \epsilon \equiv \kappa \epsilon_{0} \) is zero over some frequency range, you end up with a very odd situation.   The phase velocity of EM waves at that frequency would go to infinity, and the in-medium wavelength at that frequency would therefore become infinite.  Everything in that medium (at that frequency) would be in the near-field of everything else.  See here for a paper about what this means for transmission of EM waves through such a region, and here for a review.  
• Screening of charge and therefore carrier-carrier electrostatic interactions in 2d materials like transition metal dichalcogenides varies in a complicated way with distance.  At short range,  screening is pretty effective (logarithmic with distance, basically the result you'd get if you worried about the interaction potential from an infinitely long charged rod), and at longer distances the field lines leak out into empty space, so the potential falls like \(1/\epsilon_{0}r\).  This has a big effect on the binding of electrons and holes into excitons in these materials.
• There are a bunch of people working on unconventional transistor designs, including devices based on band-to-band tunneling between band-offset 2d materials.
• In a discussion about growth and shapes of magnetic domains in a particular system, I learned about the Wulff construction, and this great paper by Conyers Herring on why crystal take the shapes that they do.  
• After a public talk by Michel Devoret, I think I finally have some sense of the fundamental differences between the Yale group's approach to quantum computing and the John Martinis/Google group's approach.  This deserves a longer post later.  
• Oxide interfaces continue to show interesting and surprising properties - again, I hope to say more later.
• On a more science-outreach note, I learned about an app called Periscope (basically part of twitter) that allows people to do video broadcasting from their phones.  Hat tip to Julia Majors (aka Feynwoman) who pointed this out to me and that it's becoming a platform for a lot of science education work.

I'll update this post later with links to the talks when those become available.
Update:  Here is the link to all the talk videos, which have been uploaded to youtube.

Sci-fi time, part 2: Really big lasers

I had a whole post written about laser weapons, and then the announcement came out about trying to build laser-launched interstellar probes, so I figured I should revise and talk about that as well.

Now that the future is here, and space-faring rockets can land upright on autonomous ships, it's clearly time to look at other formerly science fiction technologies.  Last August I wrote a post looking at whether laser pistols really make practical physics sense as weapons.  The short answer:  Not really, at least not with present power densities.

What about laser cannons?  The US military has been looking at bigger, high power lasers for things like anti-aircraft and ship defense applications.  Given that Navy ships would not have to worry so much about portability and size, and that in principle nuclear-powered ships should have plenty of electrical generating capacity, do big lasers make more sense here?  It's not entirely clear.  Supposedly the operating costs of the laser systems are less than $1/shot, though that's also not a transparent analysis.

Let's look first at the competition.  The US Navy has been using the Phalanx gun system for ship defense, a high speed 20mm cannon that can spew out 75 rounds per second, each about 100 g and traveling at around 1100 m/s.   That's an effective output power, in kinetic energy alone, of 4.5 MW (!).  Even ignoring explosive munitions, each projectile carries 60 kJ of kinetic energy.  The laser weapons being tested are typically 150 kW.  To transfer the same amount of energy to the target as a single kinetic slug from the Phalanx would require keeping the beam focused on the target (assuming complete absorption) for about 0.4 sec, which is a pretty long time if the target is an inbound antiship missile traveling at supersonic speeds.   Clearly, as with hand-held weapons, kinetic projectiles are pretty serious in terms of power and delivered energy on target, and beating that with lasers is not simple.

The other big news story recently about big lasers was the announcement by Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking of the Starshot project, an attempt to launch many extremely small and light probes toward Alpha Centauri using ground-based lasers for propulsion.  One striking feature of the plan is the idea of using a ground-based optical phased array laser system with about 100 GW of power (!) to boost the probes up to about 0.2 c in a few minutes.  As far as I can tell, the reason for the very high power and quick boost is to avoid problems with pointing the lasers for long periods of time as the earth rotates and the probes become increasingly distant.  Needless to say, pulling this off is an enormous technical challenge.  That power would be about equivalent to 50 large city-serving powerplants.   I really wonder if it would be easier to drop the power by a factor of 1000, increase the boost time by a factor of 1000, and use a 100 MW nuclear reactor in solar orbit (i.e. at the earth-sun L1 or L2 point) to avoid the earth rotation or earth orbital velocity constraint.  That level of reactor power is comparable to what is used in naval ships, and I have a feeling like the pain of working out in space may be easier to overcome than the challenge of building a 100 GW laser array.  Still, exciting times that anyone is even entertaining the idea of trying this.

"Joulies": the coffee equivalent of whiskey stones, done right

Once upon a time I wrote a post about whiskey stones, rocks that you cool down and then place into your drink to chill your Scotch without dilution, and why they are rather lousy at controlling your drink's temperature.  The short version:  Ice is so effective, per mass, at cooling your drink because its melting is a phase transition.  Add heat to a mixture of ice and water, and the mixture sits there at zero degrees Celsius, sucking up energy (the "latent heat") as the solid ice is converted into liquid water.  Conversely, a rock just gets warmer.

Now look at Joulies, designed to keep your hot beverage of choice at about 60 degrees Celsius.  Note:  I've never used these, so I don't know how well-made they are, but the science behind them is right.  They're stainless steel and contain a material that happens to have a melting phase transition right at 60 C and a pretty large latent heat - more on that below.  If you put them into coffee that's hotter than this, the coffee will transfer heat to the Joulies until their interior warms up to the transition, and then the temperature of the coffee+Joulies will sit fixed at 60 C as the filling partially melts.   Then, if you leave the coffee sitting there and it loses heat to the environment through evaporation, conduction, convection, and radiation, the Joulies will transfer heat back to the coffee as their interior solidifies, again doing their level best to keep the (Joulies+coffee) at 60 C as long as there is a liquid/solid mixture within the Joulies.  This is how you regulate the temperature of your beverage.  (Note that we can estimate the total latent heat of the filling of the Joulies - you'd want it to be enough that cooling 375 ml of coffee from 100 C to 60 C would not completely melt the filling.  At 4.18 J/g for the specific heat of water (close enough), the total latent heat of the Joulies filling should be more than 375 g  \( \times \) 40 degrees C  \( \times \) 4.18 J/g = 62700 J. )

Unsurprisingly, the same company offers a version filled with a different material, one that melts a bit below 0 C, for cooling your cold beverages.  Basically they function like an ice cube, but with the melting liquid contained within a thin stainless steel shell so that it doesn't dilute your drink.

Random undergrad anecdote:  As a senior in college I was part of an undergrad senior design team in a class where the theme was satellites and spacecraft.  We designed a probe to land on Venus, and a big part of our design was a temperature-regulating reservoir of a material with a big latent heat of melting and a melting point at something like 100 C, to keep the interior of the probe comparatively cool for as long as possible.  Clearly we should've been early investors in Joulies.