nanoscale views

It’s that time of year again.  The physics Nobel will be announced next Tuesday, and the chemistry prize on Wednesday.  Who will it be this ...

Condensed matter physicists often speak of the "electronic fluid" in conductors, and we use a lot of vocabulary that makes analogi...

Sorry to talk politics. In now-classic fashion, there was a just-before-close-of-business-Friday announcement by the executive branch yester...

 A few more interesting tidbits from the concluding half-day of the DOE ECMP PI meeting: Dmitri Basov showed some of the remarkable experim...

It was another very full day.   I had to pop in and out to attend to some things so I didn't get everything, but here are some physics i...

That was a full day.  Here are some things I learned, beyond the fact that the ballroom here is clearly kept at about 15°C by default.  (Apo...

This week I am attending the every-two-years DOE Experimental Condensed Matter Physics PI meeting.  Previously I have written up highlights ...

Back in the dawn of the 21st century, the American Chemical Society founded a new journal, Nano Letters , to feature letters-length papers a...

The fall semester is about to begin at my university, and I'm going to be teaching undergraduate statistical and thermal physics.  This ...

Amazingly, this blog has now been around for more than twenty years (!) - see this first post for reference from June of 2005, when I had m...

It's been a busy time that has cut into my blogging, but I wanted to point out some links from the past couple of weeks. Physics Today ...

The beginning of a RET poster session Research Experience for Teachers  (RET) programs are an example of the kind of programs that the Natio...

The US House and Senate appropriations subcommittees have now completed their markups on the bills relevant to the FY26 appropriations for N...

Some not-actively-discouraging news out of Washington DC yesterday:  The Senate appropriations committee is doing its markups of the various...

Here are a number of items from the past week or so that I think readers of this blog might find interesting: Essentially all the news perta...

I participated in a program about 15 years ago that looked at science and technology challenges faced by a subset of the US government. I ca...

The basis for much of modern electronics is a set of silicon technologies called CMOS , which stands for complementary metal oxide semicondu...

As usual, I hope to write more about particular physics topics soon, but in the meantime I wanted to share a sampling of news items: First, ...

A very quick summary of some non-negative news developments: The NSF awarded 500 more graduate fellowships this week, bringing the total fo...

Again, as a distraction from persistently concerning news, here is a science mystery of which I was previously unaware. The role of approxim...