nanoscale views

A blog about condensed matter and nanoscale physics. Why should high energy and astro folks have all the fun?

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Scalable materials for quantum information

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There is no question that the explosive spread of electronics and optoelectronic technology in the 20th century has its foundation in the gr...
Sunday, October 14, 2018

Faculty position at Rice - theoretical biological physics

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Faculty position in Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice University As part of the Vision for the Second Century (V2C2) , which is focu...
Friday, October 12, 2018

Short items

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A few interesting things I've found this past week: The connection between particle spin and quantum statistics (fermions = half-inte...
7 comments:
Sunday, October 07, 2018

A modest proposal: Congressional Science and Technology Office, or equivalent

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I was in a meeting at the beginning of the week where the topic of science and technology in policy-making came up.  One person in the meeti...
Sunday, September 30, 2018

Can you heat up your coffee by stirring?

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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...
8 comments:
Friday, September 28, 2018

Annual Nobel speculation thread

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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...
12 comments:
Thursday, September 20, 2018

What’s in a name? CMP

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At a recent DCMP meeting, my colleague Erica Carlson raised an important point:  Condensed matter physics as a discipline is almost certain...
15 comments:
Friday, September 14, 2018

Recently on the arxiv

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While it's been a busy time, a couple of interesting papers caught my eye: arxiv:1808.07865 - Yankowitz et al., Tuning superconductiv...
2 comments:
Tuesday, September 04, 2018

Looking back at the Schön scandal

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As I mentioned previously, I've realized in recent weeks that many current students out there may never have heard of Jan Hendrik Schön ...
23 comments:
Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Unidentified superconducting objects, again.

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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 ...
8 comments:
Friday, August 24, 2018

What is a Tomonaga-Luttinger Liquid?

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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...
1 comment:
Saturday, August 18, 2018

Phonons and negative mass

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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...
4 comments:
Tuesday, August 14, 2018

APS March Meeting 2019 - DCMP invited symposia, DMP focused topics

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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...
Sunday, August 12, 2018

What is (dielectric) polarization?

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This post is an indirect follow-on from here , and was spawned by a request that I discuss the "modern theory of polarization".  I...
2 comments:
Thursday, August 09, 2018

Hydraulic jump: New insights into a very old phenomenon

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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...
1 comment:
Tuesday, August 07, 2018

Faculty position at Rice - experimental atomic/molecular/optical

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Faculty Position in Experimental Atomic/Molecular/Optical Physics at Rice University The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice Univ...
Tuesday, July 31, 2018

What is Berry phase?

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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...
8 comments:
Monday, July 23, 2018

Math, beauty, and condensed matter physics

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There is a lot of discussion these days about the beauty of mathematics in physics , and whether some ideas about mathematical elegance have...
10 comments:
Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Items of interest

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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...
1 comment:
Sunday, July 08, 2018

Physics in the kitchen: Frying tofu

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

Douglas Natelson
I am a physics professor at Rice University. My group uses nanoscale tools to address open questions in condensed matter physics, the study of the remarkable emergent properties of materials. Views expressed here are my own; they do not represent the views of my employer or any other entity.
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