nanoscale views

Thermoelectricity is an old story, and I've also discussed it here .  Take a length of some conductor, and hold one end of that conduct...

 Harmonic oscillators are key elements of the physicist's toolkit for modeling the world.  Back at the end of March I wrote about some...

 It's been a busy week, so my apologies for the brevity, but here are a couple of interesting papers and sites that I stumbled upon: Bac...

What does it take to have a material behave as a metal, from the physicist's perspective?  I've written about this before (wow, I...

 While virtual meetings can be draining (no breaks to go hiking; no grabbing a beer and catching up, especially when attendees are spread ou...

This week I'm (virtually) attending this workshop , which unfortunately is zoom-based because of the ongoing pandemic and travel restric...

 Last Friday, Victor Galitski published a thought-provoking editorial on linkedin, entitled " Quantum Computing Hype is Bad for Scienc...

Hopefully the 2022 APS March Meeting in Chicago will be something closer to "normal", though (i) with covid variants it's good...

Sorry - blogging has been slow in recent days because, despite it being summer, it's been a very busy time for various reasons. Here are...

With the recent passage in the US Senate of an authorization that would potentially boost certain scientific investments by the US, and th...

Because I haven't seen this explicitly discussed anywhere, I think it's worth pointing out that everyday materials around us demonst...

I recently had the opportunity to be interviewed for the Scientific Sense podcast , available on a variety of platforms.  It was a fun discu...

  Some news items: Big news yesterday was the announcement at Condensed Matter Theory Center conference (I'll put up the link to the ta...

With the growth of computational capabilities and the ability to handle large data volumes, it looks like we are entering a new era for the ...

 I realized today that I had not had an open "Ask me something" post since December, 2018 .  Seems like it's time - please hav...

Condensed matter physicists throw around the term "disorder" quite a bit - what does this mean, and how is it quantified?  This is...

As may be obvious from my pace of posting, the last couple of weeks have been very busy and intense for multiple reasons.  I hope that once ...

 As we careen toward the end of the spring semester, here are a few interesting links for perusal: My colleagues at the Rice Center for Quan...

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University invites applications from recent Ph.D. graduates for a lecturer position in phy...

 I spent three afternoons this week attending a NSF workshop on Quantum Engineering Infrastructure.  This was based in part on the perceived...