This week in cond-mat

Two interesting papers relating to mesoscopic physics on the arxiv this past week:
cond-mat/0606486 - Jakobs et al., Temperature-induced phase averaging vs. addition of resistances in mesoscopic systems
Classically, electrical conduction is well described by Ohm's Law. Take two resistors and put them in series, and the total resistance is just the sum of the two individual resistances. In the quantum world things are more complicated. Imagine an electron incident on a tunneling barrier, such that there is some tunneling amplitude t for transmission, leading to a transmission probability of |t|^2. Now consider two such barriers in series. Classical expectations would lead you to expect a transmission probability for the two-barrier system to be (|t|^2)^2. In fact, depending on the details of the system (the incident energy of the particle, the barrier heights and widths, the separation between the barriers), the full quantum treatment can give transmission probabilities ranging from zero to one (!), because of interference effects. These can be constructive or destructive, depending on just how the multiply reflecting waves bouncing back and forth between the two barriers sort themselves out, in terms of phase differences racked up. On the macroscale, inelastic interactions with the environment act to randomize the relative phases of those waves, washing out interference effects and restoring the classical Ohm's Law result. This is treated really well by Datta in one of his books. Anyway, this paper considers just what happens at finite temperature, even in the absence of true decoherence. Because electrons that dominate conduction have a spread in energy of around kT, they have a spread in wavelengths, and effectively a spread in their phase accumulation as they bounce around between scatterers. This paper looks at the effect of that averaging on the addition of resistances.

cond-mat/0606473 - Gao et al., Cotunneling and one-dimensional localization in individual single-walled carbon nanotubes
This paper is related, in the sense that it actually looks at the temperature dependence of conduction through a one-dimensional system containing randomly distributed scatterers. In this case the system is a single-walled nanotube, which really has 1d band structure because of its geometry. The scatterers are defects or disorder, and the tubes in question are around a micron in length. Gao et al. find that the tubes exhibit activated transport (becoming exponentially more resistive as T approaches 0), though the activation energies can change as temperature is reduced. At the low temperature end they find that the tubes effectively have broken up into a 1d array of quantum dots. They argue that the varying activation energies happen as the effective dot size changes with T. As temperature is decreased, coherence is increased, and higher order tunneling processes ("cotunneling") can enhance interdot conduction. A neat result and a nice idea, though their Fig. 1 raises a common issue that comes up in many such measurements. They take a log-linear plot of resistance vs. 1/T, and have "guide to the eye" lines indicating regimes of different activation energy. Are there really clear multiple regimes, or is the effective activation energy smoothly varying over the whole range? Lines to "guide the eye" should be used with caution....

Voting in this country

I try to keep political commentary to a minimum on this blog, because there are plenty of blogs out there dedicated to that kind of discourse. I do have one observation to make, though. When considering modern politics in the US, what does it say about a political party that an apparently legitimate (that is, recognized, orchestrated, and encouraged at the national level by party leaders) part of their strategy is to suppress voter turnout? It's one thing to try to pander to -- err, energize your base to make sure that they come to the polls in droves. It's quite different to deliberately try to keep people that you think might be voting for the other side away from the polls. You know, by tactics like phone bank jamming sanctioned by the White House, blanket scrubbing of voter rolls in ways virtually guaranteed to bar legitimate voters, shredding voter registration cards of people from one party, challenging the legitimacy of every ballot cast in certain precincts to deliberately slow down the vote in areas dominated by the other party, etc.

NASA and statistics

On NPR this morning I heard NASA administrator Michael Griffin explaining why he thought it was ok to dismiss safety concerns raised by two of his managers regarding the upcoming shuttle launch. He said that since they'd had 114 flights and never lost a vehicle due to the particular problem area identified by the managers, he found it "unreasonable to think it was likely" that they would lose one in the future. There are so many things wrong with that reasoning it's hard to know where to begin. Couldn't his (2x) predecessor have said almost exactly the same thing about any foam falling off the external tank prior to the final flight of Columbia? Has he ever heard of Poisson statistics? As my thesis advisor said while on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (Times of London, April 30, 2005): "[T]he risk of a serious failure is between 1 and 2 per cent a launch, or between 24 and 43 per cent over the 28 missions still planned"
Griffin's no dummy - what he really wants to say (but can't do so explicitly because it would be so impolitic) is that he considers the risks acceptable, given that the alternative is to declare the shuttle program done because they can't retroactively fix this design flaw. What a mess.

physics sociology

There's been a brewing discussion going on, largely and appropriately in the high energy physics community, about string theory - does it actually have reasonably specific, testable predictions? If not, is it really science in the classic sense?

People can become incredibly personally vested in their ideas in science. In physics in particular there can be a tendency to assume (a) that you're right (duh!), (b) that your ideas have been arrived at by a careful intellectual process (duh! again), and (c) therefore anyone who disagrees with you is either ignorant, not very smart, or hasn't been thinking about things "the right way" (read: your way). Reminds me of Vizzini in The Princess Bride: "Ever hear of Plato? Aristotle? SOCRATES?! Morons." Prior to today, the best example of this attitude that I'd ever seen was at a talk given by a job candidate, who, when asked a very good question by one of my very respected colleagues (who happened to be on the search committee), began his response with "If you think about this a little, you'll see...." Nothing like implying that your potential future employer hasn't considered his question.

Now, though, I've got a new favorite example. From Lubos Motl's well known blog:

(UPDATE: Lubos has removed the page in question, so the link is now broken.)
(UPDATE II: Lubos has put the page back, re-edited, but the new version still conveys his clear view that only high energy theorists, and specifically string theorists, are actually doing science - the rest of us are just wankers, apparently.)

Sorry to say but this is the last well-known physics blog on this planet; all others blogs that claim to have something to do with science are just politically correct tools for crackpots to make their deep misunderstandings of the basics of modern physics ever more powerful and legitimized, and to destroy physics as such at a finite timescale.

Oooooookay. So, everyone else is a complete idiot. Got it. Might as well pack up my computer and quit now.

Recently on cond-mat

Here are a couple of recent preprints that caught my eye. I'm going to try to get back to chronicling these weekly, if I can find the self-discipline....

cond-mat/0606430 - Streed et al., Continuous and pulsed Quantum Zeno Effect
This experiment is really an atomic physics experiment, but it is on cond-mat, and the physics is very cool. The Quantum Zeno Effect gets its name from Zeno's Paradox: in order to get from point A to point B, a person would first have to get half-way; however, to get to the midpoint between A & B, a person would first have to get half-way to that spot, and so on. Thus, noone can ever get anywhere. While the solution to this apparent paradox lies in the idea of rates and limits (at a given instant, there is something called the velocity that is the rate of change of distance per unit time), one can set up a quantum case where a system really never does get from state A to state B. This is a result of the basic postulates of quantum mechanics: after a measurement of some observable, the system is left in an eigenstate of that observable. If the same observable is measured again before the system has had a chance to evolve (via the Schroedinger equation and whatever the Hamiltonian is), the system will still be in that same eigenstate that was just found. So, if one keeps measuring the system continuously, the state of the system can't evolve. The act of continuous measurement locks the system in that one eigenstate. Ketterle's group at MIT have managed to implement a version of this using a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium atoms. Very neat.

cond-mat/0606375 - Reich et al., Observation of magnetism in thin gold films
This paper is already out as an Applied Physics Letter. The authors report sensitive magnetic susceptibility measurements on thin Au films, and find that, depending greatly on substrate and preparation, it is possible for those films to be significantly paramagnetic. This is a bit weird, since Au in bulk is diamagnetic. Of course, there have been reports of weird magnetism in nanostructured Au before, including ferromagnetism in Au clusters and whopping big magnetic effects in the presence of self-assembled monolayers of molecules. All of these effects have been challenging for folks to reproduce and confirm, in part because it really does seem like every little detail about sample prep and interfaces matters. It's always interesting to see how even things that seem like they should be well understood can be rich and complex. My personal theory on these effects is that they involve orbital moments in the Au caused by interfacial charge transfer and the strong spin-orbit scattering in Au. Some theorists seem to have the same idea.

Amazingly inappropriate ad from a vendor

Wow. Late this afternoon I got an email advertisement from an equipment vendor that was astonishingly over the line of propriety. The company makes plasma tools for processing semiconductors, and they were advertising their upcoming exhibit at Semicon West, the big semiconductor trade show. One of their pieces of equipment is a tool that uses an oxygen plasma to strip away photoresist residue. The email ad included an image of this tool, and a picture of a (apparently supposedly hot) woman with a come-hither look, and big letters saying "I'll strip for you." I'm hardly a zealot of political correctness, but this was so unprofessional that my jaw dropped. This will not result in increased sales. At most companies something like that would be grounds for a harassment complaint.

UPDATE: here is the ad in question, with the vendor blocked out....

Curse you, rotavirus!

Right now I'm the only member of my family not battling some nasty stomach bug. You know it's bad when your spouse calls you to ask you to pick the recovering younger child up at school, because she and the older child are too ill to get in the car.

Observations about NSF panels

I just returned from an NSF review panel. For those of you that don't know, the NSF peer-reviews all grant proposals, and many programs have a panel review system: an NSF program officer will email you or call you and ask if you are available on such-and-such a date for a panel. If you're willing to do it, you say "yes", and then you're given electronic access to about 8 proposals to review. You do your reviews at your leisure over the next few weeks and upload them via the impressively good web-based system, Fastlane. Then you go to Washington (really Ballston, VA) to NSF headquarters at the appointed time, and sit down in a room with about 10 other reviewers plus the program officer. Everyone has a laptop in front of them, and now you can see each other's reviews. You go through all the proposals (usually about 30 for the whole panel), discuss and compare notes, and in the end write up panel summaries of the reviews that eventually get sent to the proposal writers (PIs, or principal investigators). Typically the proposals are grouped into three categories: "highly recommended" (will actually get funded), "recommended" (on the edge, and may get lucky if there's enough money available), and "not recommended" (no chance). These days the yield of "highly recommended" is 5-15% at NSF, depending on the program. The government pays your travel, and you get a nominal stipend that covers hotel and meals.

A few observations:

• The main reason to do this is one of citizenship: you can really see the process work, learn how to improve your own proposals, and reassure yourself that the people reviewing the grants have a clue.
• Why are there never people from top 15 schools at these panels? Are they really only involved in things like site visits for major center proposals? Seriously, I've never seen someone from any Ivy League school, any of the UC schools, MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Illinois, etc. on one of these things. Are they really all that much busier than me?
• It's painful when someone is on a panel that is not technologically literate enough to handle the web-based system.
• It's equally painful when someone bails at the last minute, doesn't review their share, and doesn't show up.
• This is still the best system around. Scary.

To write, or not to write

I've been talking with a major publishing house about writing a textbook based on my two-semester course sequence, Nanostructures and Nanotechnology I and II. I've been teaching these classes for the last several years, and they've been very successful. The editor has sent out a detailed outline of my ideas, and the feedback from reviewers has been very positive. That's nice and validating, but I remain pretty conflicted about doing this. I know a few things:

• Every one of my research-active faculty colleagues here looks at me like I'm absolutely stark raving bonkers for even considering this - I should be spending all my resources on my research.
• Right now, there is no text for this sort of thing at this level. There is real potential for a transformative effect if the book is good. If I wait 5 years, someone else will write the book instead of me.
• However long I think this will take, it will take longer.
• It would be very nice to feel like I'm having an educational impact on more than 20 students a year.
• I'm unlikely to get any support in this (time off from teaching, etc.) from my institution.
• I have it on good authority that the editor in question is very good, and that this publisher is generally as pleasurable to deal with as any.

So. What to do. Any comments from out there?

This week in cond-mat

Two preprints that caught my eye this week:

cond-mat/0604528 - Elimination of the supersolid state through crystal annealing, Rittner et al.
This paper is the work of John Reppy's group at Cornell, and is part of a large effort going on by a number of people to verify or refute the observations of Moses Chan's group - that there's a "supersolid" state of helium (4He) under high pressure (tens of bars) and low temperatures (below 1 K). A supersolid is a solid that exhibits "nonclassical rotational inertia". Put another way, in a superfluid, the atoms in the system form a kind of condensate - a macroscopic quantum phase where all the atoms behave cooperatively. If the atoms are weakly interacting bosons, the system can be described as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In a supesolid, the vacancies in the crystal lattice are thought to undergo some kind of condensation into a single quantum phase. This new paper reproduces the results of Chan et al., and finds that the supersolid behavior in 4He crystals can be eliminated entirely by annealing the crystals near their melting point. It would appear that the disorder responsible for the supersolidity can be removed by annealing. Nice paper.


cond-mat/0605739 - Landau level spectroscopy of ultrathin graphite layers, Sadowski et al.
This paper shows some beautiful cyclotron resonance data taken on graphene sheets as a function of carrier density. As I've mentioned before, graphene is a very funky model system, in which the electrons and holes act just like (apparently) massless Dirac fermions, because of the peculiarities of the graphene band structure. This work is very pretty, and is a cool example of an experiment that, in some ways, is analogous to electron-positron pair production (!). I'm a big fan of solid state systems that are models of more general physics.

Fraud follow-up

I just received the following email from Phys Rev Letters:

Dear Dr. Natelson,

We are in the process of considering the issues you raise about the
Letter by XXXXX et al.  Such consideration often takes a substantial
amount of time.  Fortunately, in the present case, in which the paper
at issue was published six years ago, there does not appear to be
cause for time pressure.  We will apprise you of our conclusion when
we reach it.


Sincerely,


Reinhardt B. Schuhmann
Editor
Physical Review Letters

Well, I guess we'll see what happens. It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of this. I'm quite sure there's something fishy about the particular paper, but it may be very hard to ever prove.

Possible fraud....

In the course of serving on a committee for a graduate oral presentation, I noticed something very strange looking in a Phys Rev Letter from a few years ago. While unlikely to be seen in a casual glance at the printed version of the journal, it was very striking when the figures were blown up to 4' on a side by a digital projector. Basically, it looks like someone used what I shall delicately term the "Photoshop operator" to massage their data. This paper has been cited 65 times since its publication, and has been milked heavily by its authors.

So, what is the right course of action? I've got no actual proof of fraud, just a very suspicious figure. I've now emailed the editors at PRL twice about this, and received no response from any human being - just the form letter generated by their mail system. Since this is circumstantial, I'm certainly not going to accuse anyone publicly. Next I'm going to call PRL on the phone. Updates as events warrant.

This week in cond-mat

There are three papers I'd like to bring up from the past week or so that I think are pretty neat pieces of physics:

cond-mat/0605061 - Boulant et al., Bloch oscillations in a Josephson circuit.
This is the most recent paper from the Quantronics (quantum electronics) group at Saclay, a collaborative effort that routinely cranks out some of the most elegant and pretty physics experiments using nanodevices. Consider a tunnel junction with some capacitance C. To move a single electron across the junction would generically require an amount of energy (in the form of eV, where e is the electronic charge and V is the dc bias voltage across the junction) that exceeds the capacitive charging energy of the junction, ~ e^2/2C. If such a junction is hooked up to a constant current source, the voltage across the junction is expected to vary like a sawtooth pattern: rising linearly with time until it hits that threshold, and then dropping quickly as the electron tunnels. If one does this with a superconductor, the relevant particles are Cooper pairs with charge 2e, but the effect is the same: a constant current bias should lead to an ac voltage across the junction, with a dominant frequency proportional to the current. These ac voltage wiggles are called Bloch oscillations, and have not been measured directly yet. There's all kinds of reasons why doing so is hard, most related to the fact that it's hard to really make a true constant current source at the relevant frequency scale. Remember, one microamp of current would lead to THz oscillations. Anyway, these folks made a more complicated structure with two junctions, and use that structure to terminate an rf line. When they send rf power into the line and look at the reflected rf coming back, they can see sidebands in the reflected signal offset from the input frequency by the Bloch frequency. It's a very pretty experiment.

cond-mat/0604654 - van der Wolen et al., The Magneto-Coulomb effect in spin valve devices.
This paper is an interesting theory paper by the group of van Wees, who has helped to define the field of mesoscopic physics. It's an examination of the interplay of magnetic effects and Coulomb charging effects in single-electron tunneling structures incorporating ferromagnetic metals. In the absence of the charging effects, the connection between magnetization and electronic transport is responsible for many useful effects like giant magnetoresistance, the basis for the read-head in your hard drive.

cond-mat/0604608 - Onac et al., Using a quantum dot as a high frequency shot noise detector.
Another beautiful and clever experiment from the mesoscopics group at Delft. It is often very challenging to measure high frequency dynamics in nanostructures, since the relatively high impedances of the devices are typically a poor match for most commercial rf electronics and coaxial cables. Life is even more difficult at very low temperatures, where most of the interesting physics often happens, because there are painful experimental constraints that must be obeyed. One method of studying rapid charge variations in quantum dots has been to use a quantum point contact as a charge detector. A QPC is a region of 2d electron gas that has been constricted using gates down to the point where only one or a couple of channels of transmission are left. Sitting on the edge of depletion of a channel, the presence or absence of charge on a nearby quantum dot can strongly change the conductance (and therefore rf impedance) of the QPC. Using rf reflectance methods like those above, this can be monitored at high frequencies. This experiment is the complement of that - by gating and biasing the quantum dot appropriately, dc transport through the dot can be strongly modified by the high frequency fluctuations of the current (shot noise) in the nearby QPC. This is a great approach for studying back-action and measurement: is the dot the detector and the QPC the system, or vice versa?

Money

A very brief post. The new estimate for the cost of ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is approaching $10B/month. For the foreseeable future. That's the entire NSF annual budget every 17 days. Remember that service on the national debt is also on the order of $20B/month. And the national debt is increasing at a rate of more than $2B/day. Some say to properly normalize those numbers you must remember that the GDP of the US is on the order of $12T/yr. Of course, it's also important to consider that 20% of all tax revenue in the US now goes to paying the debt service. How one can argue that this is all healthy is beyond me.

The second topic - polarons and molecular IVs

A second interesting discussion going on right now concerns hysteresis in molecular electronic device current-voltage characteristics. There have been a number of papers that have reported hysteretic IV curves in molecular systems, where applying a high bias can make the system undergo a transition from a low-conductance state to a higher conductance state. That higher conductance state persists until the bias voltage is cycled back down to some value below the turn-on voltage. This sort of hysteresis is interesting from the practical perspective: if the high/low conducting states are long-lived, one could imagine making a memory or logic out of devices with these properties. The main scientific question, then, is what is the underlying mechanism for this conductance switching?

One candidate that has been suggested by a number of people is polaronic. A polaron is a charge carrier accompanied by a geometric distortion of the charge carrying medium. The basic idea is that one can start with a neutral molecule, transfer an electron onto that molecule, and once that electron is there, the molecule could distort in such a way as to greatly lower the total energy of the system. The result is that the molecule could trap that additional electron via a geometric deformation. If the neutral and charged states of the molecule have significantly different couplings to the source and drain electrodes, this kind of trapping could conceivably lead to hysteretic switching between conductance states. Such a strong electron-vibrational coupling would basically make the effective on-site repulsion, U (for the no vibrational coupling case), be renormalized downward, all the way to a negative value.

This problem is interesting because it's fundamentally non-perturbative, at least in the electron-vibrational coupling, and generally non-equilibrium, too. Theorists have therefore been arguing about the right way to solve this system. As always, the whole point of this kind of theory is to come up with a toy model that includes all the essential physics and omits nothing of importance, and then use some method to solve it. If one leaves out the coupling between the electronic level and the leads, and considers just a single electronic level, this problem can be solved analytically, with no hysteresis showing up. One can include the coupling to the leads in some limit, and solve using Hartee-Fock techniques, again finding no hysteresis. One can choose a different set of limits, and find hysteresis; and finally, one can do a more sophisticated treatment of the nonequilibrium aspects and find telegraph-like switching rather than hysteresis. The big question is, which if any of these models are really relevant to the regime of experiments? It's highly likely that much switching in experiments really has to do with the geometry of the molecule-metal bond, rather than anything this exotic. Of course, that doesn't mean it's not worth trying to examine this question deliberately through experiments....

Two interesting condensed matter debates

In the past couple of weeks, two interesting debates have come to my attention in condensed matter circles. The first has to do with electronic transport in graphene, and isn't really a debate - more of an interesting observation having to do with weak localization, a specific quantum correction to the classical electrical conductivity. Consider an electron propagating through a solid, scattering off of static disorder (lattice defects, grain boundaries). Feynman tells us that we have to add amplitudes for all possible paths through the material, and then square the sum of those amplitudes to get a transmission probability, assuming that all the paths add coherently. Some relevant trajectories include closed loops, that take the electron back past its starting point. For each loop like that, there is another trajectory with the loop traversed in the opposite direction. In the absence of spin-orbit scattering or magnetic fields, those loops and their time-reversed conjugates all add in phase and interfere constructively. The result is an enhanced (nonclassical) probability for the electron to back-scatter, leading to an enhanced resistance. Now, if one threads magnetic flux through those loops, electrons traversing loops in opposite directions are phase shifted relative to one another, and the constructive interference is broken. The weak localization enhancement of the resistance is suppressed at high magnetic fields, and the result is a magnetoresistance, with a field scale set by the size of the typical coherent loop. This is one of the main ways people estimate quantum coherence lengths in conductors.

What does any of this have to do with graphene? Well, here Andre Geim and coworkers look at transport in single graphene sheets, and find that weak localization is essentially absent. It turns out that the particular electronic structure of graphene implies that one can get the effect of a magnetic field if the graphene sheet isn't really flat. (For the experts: this has something to do with a pseudospin involving two equivalent sublattices on the sheet, and the breaking of that symmetry by roughness. I don't really understand this, so please let me know if there's a clear writeup about this somewhere.) Conversely, in a new paper de Heer and co-workers grow graphene epitaxially on SiC wafers, and do observe weak localization. Interesting - this seems to imply that the material grown by de Heer is in some ways intrinsically superior to that prepared by other methods. This is also roughly confirmed by the mobilities (25 m^2/Vs in de Heer's, 10 m^2/Vs in Geim's).

I'll hit the second discussion in the next post....

Science magazine and retracted papers

Since Science isn't going to run my letter to the editor, I'll just vent about it here. In last week's issue, Science ran a news article about the distressing tendency of retracted papers to linger on in the literature, sometimes still picking up citations long after the retraction. In the old days of strictly print journals, the excuse was that someone could stumble upon the original hardcopy of the retracted paper and not realize that it had been withdrawn. Now, though, the problem continues even in on-line versions of the papers. The Science reporters had expressed surprise that retraction notices don't always catch everyone's attention.

I find this very ironic, because Science has been part of the problem. Back in the dark days of late 2002, the Beasley Commission officially released their report, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jan Hendrik Schon was a complete fraud, and that his major papers needed to be retracted. The retractions happened almost immediately. Fast forward to December 2003, when two students writing final papers for my course mistakenly cite Schon's Science papers, despite their retraction over a year before. Why did the students not realize that the papers had been withdrawn? Because google had linked directly to the pdf versions of the papers, and Science had not marked up the pdf files to indicate the retraction. So, I used the on-line feedback form to tell Science about this problem. No response beyond an automated "Thank you for your email" formletter. Fast forward again to December, 2004. Again a student cites a Schon Science paper in the final paper for my course. Over two years after the fact, and the pdf files still don't indicate the retraction. I sent another letter, with a similar response.

Science has finally fixed this problem sometime in the intervening 15 months or so. I just find it funny that they seem to shift the blame onto their readership, when they themselves aggravated this problem by being too lazy to fix their pdf files for over two years. For Pete's sake - we're only talking about a handful of papers. It would've taken all of ten minutes to append the retraction to each file. Ahh well.

Tenure

I recently found out that I'm getting tenure. Hooray!

It is strangely anticlimactic, and I think I know why. When you get your PhD, it happens at a well-defined moment. There's a defense, applause, a document that gets signed, etc. Tenure is much more diffuse. Months ago I submitted my "package" - my CV, some representative reprints, a statement of my research results and plans, etc. My department then sent out for external letters, and eventually had a vote of the tenured faculty on my case, as well as that of a couple of colleagues. The whole thing then got pushed forward to the dean's level, and eventually to the university's promotions and tenure committee. Fall turned to spring. Eventually I heard back positively, meaning that I got a letter telling me that in another month the board of trustees will give this there seal of approval, and then as of the next fiscal year (July 1), I'll be an associate professor. So you can see that the tenure transition is much more adiabatic, if you will. Day to day, nothing changes, though it's certainly nice!

Bell Labs and industrial research

Well, it's finally happened: my friends at Bell Labs are going to be learning to speak French, since Lucent and Alcatel are merging (as "equals", of course). What this means for Bell Labs is unclear. Since they do a fair bit of DOD work, at least part of the labs will have to be operated by an American-owned spinoff of some kind. This would further fragment the research organization, which was already split by the spinoff of Agere (motto: Welcome to Agere, Bell Labs researchers - here's your lay-off paperwork.) and the hemorrhaging of personnel, particularly in the physical sciences.

The continued shrinking of industrial research in the US is extremely depressing. There are things that can be done in an industrial research environment that just don't work well at a university. With the prevailing attitude that any research directed at long-term (say > 5 years) goals is effectively a waste of money unless it pumps up the stock price right now, it's no wonder that we're facing tough times in terms of competitiveness. I believe this is the equivalent of "eating the seed corn."

How to spot bogus science

There is a great, free article in the Chronicle of Higher Education from back in 2003 that has just come to my attention, about how to spot bogus science. The article is by Bob Park, who writes a weekly "What's New" column that used to grace the APS webpage.

This is an important read, particularly as there seems to be a steady flux these days of news items that seem pretty weird to me. For example, these folks are a bunch of cold fusion advocates, who last week put out a big press release about how happy they are that Martin Fleischmann is joining their product development team. For another example, take this announcement by the European Space Agency that their researchers think they've spotted a funny gravitomagnetic effect near rotating (low Tc) superconductors. The data look pretty marginal to me, and I think it's pretty indicative that on the one hand they put out a big, glossy press release, while on the other hand they submitted the paper to Physica C. I don't want to knock Physica C too badly, but they aren't exactly a high impact journal. At least the ESA researchers are using the peer-reviewed literature, though, and seem to be reasonably careful. They need to be, though - they're claiming big deviations from general relativity, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.