nanoscale views

A fun question asked by a student in my class:  To what extent do you heat up your coffee by stirring it?  It was a huge conceptual advanc...

As my friend DanM pointed out in the comments of a previous post, it's Nobel season again, next Tuesday for physics.  Dan puts forward h...

At a recent DCMP meeting, my colleague Erica Carlson raised an important point:  Condensed matter physics as a discipline is almost certain...

While it's been a busy time, a couple of interesting papers caught my eye: arxiv:1808.07865 - Yankowitz et al., Tuning superconductiv...

As I mentioned previously, I've realized in recent weeks that many current students out there may never have heard of Jan Hendrik Schön ...

I've had a number of people ask me why I haven't written anything about the recent news and resulting kerfuffle ( here , here , and ...

I've written in the past (say here and here ) about how we think about the electrons in a conventional metals as forming a Fermi Liqui...

There has been quite a bit of media attention given to this paper , which looks at whether sound waves involve the transport of mass (and t...

A reminder to my condensed matter colleagues who go to the APS March Meeting:  We know the quality of the meeting depends strongly on gettin...

This post is an indirect follow-on from here , and was spawned by a request that I discuss the "modern theory of polarization".  I...

Ever since I learned about them, I thought that hydraulic jumps were cool.  As I wrote here , a hydraulic jump is an analog of a standing s...

Faculty Position in Experimental Atomic/Molecular/Optical Physics at Rice University The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice Univ...

On the road to discussing the Modern Theory of Polarization (e.g., pdf ), it's necessary to talk about Berry phase - here, unlike many u...

There is a lot of discussion these days about the beauty of mathematics in physics , and whether some ideas about mathematical elegance have...

While trying to write a few things (some for the blog, some not), I wanted to pass along some links of interest: APS March Meeting intere...

I was going to title this post "On the emergence of spatial and temporal coherence in frying tofu", or "Frying tofu:  Time cr...

A paper was published yesterday in Nature Nanotechnology that is quite surprising, at least to me, and I thought I should point it out. T...

I recently received a copy of The Secret Life of Science:  How It Really  Works and Why  It Matters , by Jeremy Baumberg of Cambridge Unive...

In his review of Sabine Hossenfelder's new book for Scientific American, John Horgan begins by saying: Does anyone who follows physi...

How's that  for a provocative, click-bait headline? More than any other branch of physics, condensed matter physics highlights  univer...