nanoscale views

One truly remarkable feature of statistical physics (and condensed matter physics in particular) is the emergence of phase transitions. Whe...

I had a conversation today that made me think about the following. These days we're told countless times that it's essential for a ...

Somehow I had missed this paper when it came out on the arxiv last November, but I came across it the other day while looking for something...

Perhaps someone out there can enlighten me. For review articles, if you want to reproduce a figure from someone's published work, you a...

It would appear that the arxiv is having some issues. Bizarrely, this seems to affect cond-mat, but not (for example) astr-ph. In cond-mat...

There have been a number of exciting (to me, anyway) papers on the arxiv this past week. One in particular, though, seems like a neat illus...

There's a new asap paper in Nano Letters that is very slick. There has been a lot of interest in the last few years in plasmonics - th...

Four items, and a physics post later in the week. Is "just-in-time" supply chain management truly the work of the devil, or merely...

Not a physics post, but an observation. There is a major event going on in Iran right now - protests involving many thousands of people; ri...

No, I have not compiled my blog postings into dead-tree format. Nor have I finished my textbook based on my graduate nanoscale physics cour...

Two papers appeared on the arxiv in the last couple of days concerning the very hot topic of quantum-limited measurement. I'm no expert...

Several minor things.... I've got an article on single-molecule electronics coming out in the June issue of Physics World . It's re...

Reading Eugenie Reich's Plastic Fantastic brought me right back to the heady days of my postdoc, job search, and nearly a year spent wi...

I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday evening and saw a copy of Plastic Fantastic in their science section. This is Eugenie Reich 's t...

By now many of you have run across Wolfram|Alpha , billed by its creator as a "computational knowledge engine". I've been goo...

Many of us know the joy of getting email from, err, enthusiastic amateurs claiming to have solved all of the great problems of modern physic...

Two recent arxiv papers caught my eye. I'm not working on graphene, but these are both pretty interesting results. arxiv:0905.0923 - M...

I saw the new Star Trek movie last night, and it was extremely fun. Great special effects, with nods to all the appropriate elements of th...

At the workshop I'd mentioned, because of time constraints only 11 of the participants had the chance to give full talks. To try to get...

I just finished attending a three-day workshop near Washington, DC sponsored by the National Nanotechnology Initiative (and other "pa...