nanoscale views

Given my previous post and the Higgs excitement, it's worth thinking a bit about what we mean by "effective mass" for charge c...

The (most likely) Higgs boson discovery brings up a distinction in my mind that seems to be getting overlooked in most of the popular press ...

I'll post something else later now that I'm back from travel, but in the meantime, congratulations to my high energy colleagues on t...

The Texas Republican Party platform for 2012 is out ( pdf ).  I've complained about previous incarnations before .  This time they inclu...

Here's an experimentalist complaint for which I do not think there is an analogous theorist problem.  In my lab we have a piece of equip...

I recently came across this story .  I'd heard about it at a NSF panel but hadn't gotten all the details.  This person (who plead gu...

This paper was just published in Nano Letters .  The authors use suspended, single-layer graphene as a template for the growth (via atomic ...

There are a variety of blog discussions going on right now concerning rumors of the Higgs boson.  Peter Woit's post about Higgs rumors...

My thesis advisor has a mastery of an impressive library of handy physics tidbits, the kinds of things that have proven very useful to him a...

I've just found MathJax , which is a javascript-based rendering plug-in for either LaTeX or MathML formatted equations. It took me a fe...

Just pointing out that real life has been very busy of late.  Hopefully I'll have more blogging time shortly.  In the meantime, definite...

This is a topic that comes up at many research universities, and I'd be curious for your opinions.  Some institutions formally allow res...

This past week I was fortunate enough to attend this workshop at Trinity College, Dublin , all about the physics of atomic- and molecular-...

In our most recent paper , we found that we could dope a particularly interesting material, vanadium dioxide, with atomic hydrogen, via ...

I just received the following email: Dear Pro. , Considering your research in related areas, we cordially invite you to submit ...

Edward Purcell was one of the great physicists of the 20th century.  He won the Nobel Prize in physics for his (independent) discovery of ...

Thanks to ZapperZ for bringing this to my attention. This paper is about to appear in Phys Rev Letters, and argues that the Lorentz forc...

When we teach about thermal physics at the macroscopic scale, we talk in terms of the thermal conductivity, k .  For the 1d problem of a ho...

A long while ago, I brought up the topic of persistent currents in normal metal rings .  Please click the link to get the context.  The poi...

This article in the NY Times is rather provocative in several ways. First, it raises the question of whether there is a dramatic rise tak...