nanoscale views

Over the years I've written quite a few posts that try to explain physics concepts relevant to condensed matter/nano topics.  I've t...

Millie Dresselhaus has passed away at 86.  She was a true giant, despite her diminutive stature.   I don't think anything I could writ...

There has been a flurry of news lately about the possibility of achieving metallic hydrogen in the lab.  The quest for metallic hydrogen is...

Recall a (conventional, real-space) crystal involves a physical system with a large number of constituents spontaneously arranging itself in...

Blogging is taking a back seat right now.  I'm only posting because I know some Rice connections and alumni read here and may not have h...

(I'm bringing this up because I want to write about " time crystals ", and to do that....) A crystal is a larger whole com...

I've been very busy lately, hence a slow down in posting, but in the meantime I wanted to recommend a book.   The Pope of Physics is th...

In my colleague Rebecca Richards-Kortum 's great talk at Rice's CUWiP meeting this past weekend, she spoke about her undergrad degr...

What with the start of the semester and the thick of graduate admissions season, it's been a busy week, so rather than an extensive post...

A belated happy new year to my readers.  Back in 2005 , nearly every popularizer of physics on the web, television, and bookshelves was eith...

When the news is filled with bleak items, like: The deaths of prominent scientists   The deaths of many notable figures (too many to...

A few weeks ago I posted about one approach to mapping out where current flows at the nanoscale, scanning gate microscopy .   I had made an...

It's been a little while (ok, 1.6 years) since I made a few posts  about recurring motifs that crop up in physics, particularly in con...

Many elemental metals become superconductors at sufficiently low temperatures, but not all.  Ironically, some of the normal metal elements w...

I'd be curious for opinions out there regarding available textbooks for "Modern Physics".  Typically this is a sophomore-level...

Much has been written about quantum computers and their prospects for doing remarkable things (see here for one example of a great primer ),...

Some additional brief items: Rice's Smalley-Curl Institute has two competitive, endowed postdoctoral opportunities coming up, the J....

A handful of brief items: A biologist former colleague has some good advice on writing successful NSF proposals that translates well to ...

As alluded to in my previous posts on metamaterials and metasurfaces , there have been some recently published papers that take these ideas...

As I alluded in my previous post , metamaterials are made out of building blocks, and thanks to the properties of those building blocks and ...