nanoscale views

When we teach basic electrical phenomena to high school or college physics students, we usually talk about Ohm's Law, in the form \(V = ...

While I have already spammed a number of faculty colleagues about this, I wanted to point out a competitive, endowed postdoctoral opportunit...

Angular momentum in classical physics is a well-defined quantity tied to the motion of mass about some axis - its value (magnitude and direc...

Yesterday, we hosted Prof. Charlie Marcus of the Niels Bohr Institute and Microsoft for our annual Chapman Lecture on Nanotechnology.   He...

Condensed matter experimentalists often need to prepare nanoscale thickness films of a variety of materials.  One approach is to use "p...

In a sure sign that I'm getting old, I find myself tempted to read some of the many articles, books, and discussions about interpretatio...

Thanks to a commenter (and ZapperZ ) for bringing to my attention that a bunch of invited talks from this year's March APS meeting are n...

An enormous amount has already been written by both journalists and scientists  ( here too ) on the passing of Stephen Hawking .  Clearly h...

Besides the graphene bilayer excitement, a three other highlights from today: David Cobden of the University of Washington gave a very ni...

As I mentioned here, the big story of this year's March Meeting is the report, in back-to-back Nature papers this week (arxiv pdf links ...

Day 2 of the meeting was even more scattered than usual for me, because several of my students were giving talks, all in different sessions ...

As I explained yesterday, my trip to the APS is even more scattered than in past years, but I'll try to give some key points.  Because o...

It's that time of year again:  The running of the physicists  annual APS March Meeting , a gathering of thousands of (mostly condensed m...

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...