nanoscale views

Fictional materials can be a fun starting point for thinking about and maybe teaching about material properties.  Back in 2015 I touched on ...

Last weekend while making dinner, I came across a great example of emergent physics.  What you see here are a few hundred grams of vacuum-pa...

In case someone out there is interested, Rice is hiring a cleanroom research scientist.  The official job listing is here .  To be clear:  T...

Back when my blogging was young, I had a semi-regular posting of papers that caught my eye that week on the condensed matter part of the ar...

If you're a new reader, perhaps brought here by the mention of this blog in the Washington Post , welcome!   Great to have you here.  Ju...

Nature has a piece up about science blogging .  It's pretty much on target.  I'm a bit surprised that there wasn't more discussi...

A significant piece of my research program is optics-related, and thanks to an invited talk, I'm spending a couple of days at the SPIE P...

One big challenge of talking about condensed matter physics to a general audience is that there are a lot of important physical concepts tha...

In addition to science, I occasionally use this forum as a way to try to explain to students and the public how sponsored research works in ...

A few recent items that caught my eye: The ever-creative McEuen and Cohen groups at Cornell worked together to make graphene-based orig...

Happy new year to all!  I'm sure 2018 will bring some exciting developments in the discipline - at minimum, there will surely be a lot o...

Because of real life constraints I'm a bit slow off the mark compared to others , but I've just finished reading The Quantum Labyri...

It seems like every few weeks these days there is a breathless essay or editorial saying science is broken , or that science as a whole is ...

See here for part 1 .   Recall, we had been studying electrical conduction in V 5 S 8 , a funky material that is metallic, but on one type o...

I am going to try to get the post frequency back up now that some tasks are getting off the to-do list.... Last year, we found what seem...

Sorry for the light blogging - between departmental duties and deadline-motivated writing, it's been very difficult to squeeze in much b...

My readers know I've complained/bemoaned repeatedly how challenging it can be to explain condensed matter physics on a popular level in ...

As has happened periodically over the last couple of decades (I remember a scare about this when Newt Gingrich's folks ran Congress in t...

Real life is a bit busy right now, but I wanted to point out a couple of links and talk about what's coming up. I've been looking ...

I just returned from a NSF proposal review panel.  I had written about NSF panels back in the early days of this blog here , back when I may...