Items of interest
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
4d ago
The time since the APS meeting has been very busy, hence the lack of posting.  A few items of interest: The present issue of Nature Physics has several articles about physics education that I really want to read.  This past week we hosted N. Peter Armitage for a really fun colloquium "On Ising's Model of Magnetism" (a title that he acknowledged borrowing from Peierls).  In addition to some excellent science about spin chains, the talk included a lot of history of science about Ising that I hadn't known.  An interesting yet trivial tidbit: when he was in Germany and later L ..read more
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APS March Meeting, Day 4 and wrap-up
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
3w ago
Because of the timing of my flight back to Houston, I really only went to one session today, in which my student spoke as did some collaborators.  It was a pretty interesting collection of contributed talks.   The work that's been done on spin transport in multiferroic insulators is particularly interesting to me.  A relevant preprint is this one, in which electric fields are used to reorient \(\mathbf{P}\) in BiFeO3, which correspondingly switches the magnetization in this system (which is described by a complicated spin cycloid order) and therefore modulates the transmis ..read more
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APS March Meeting 2024, Day 2
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
3w ago
A decent part of today was spent in conversation with friends and colleagues, but here are some high points of scientific talks: The DMP prize session was excellent.  The first talk was by Harold Hwang, this year's awardee of the McGroddy Prize.  He gave a very compelling review of his group's accomplishments doing epitaxial growth of perovskite oxides, ranging over early work on colossal magnetoresistance compounds, designing conducting interfaces, understanding polar catastrophes, attempts at delta doping, creating free-standing oxide membranes, and most recently "de-int ..read more
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APS March Meeting 2024, Day 1
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
3w ago
There is no question that the meeting venue in Minneapolis is superior in multiple ways to last year's meeting in Las Vegas.  The convention center doesn't feel scarily confining, and it also doesn't smell like a combination of cigarettes and desperation. Here are a few highlights from the day: There was an interesting session about "polar materials", systems that have the same kind of broken inversion symmetry within a unit cell as ferroelectrics; this includes "polar metals" which host mobile charge carriers.  One polar material family involving multiferroic insulators was present ..read more
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APS March Meeting 2024 - coming soon
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
3w ago
This week I'm going to be at the APS March Meeting in Minneapolis.  As I've done in past years, I will try to write up some highlights of talks that I am able to see, though it may be hit-or-miss.  If readers have suggestions for sessions or talks that they think will be particularly interesting, please put them in the comments ..read more
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2024 version: Advice on choosing a graduate school
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
1M ago
It's been four years since I posted the previous version of this, so it feels like the time is right for an update. This is written on the assumption that you have already decided, after careful consideration, that you want to get an advanced degree (in physics, though much of this applies to any other science or engineering discipline).  This might mean that you are thinking about going into academia, or it might mean that you realize such a degree will help prepare you for a higher paying technical job outside academia.  Either way,  I'm not trying to argue the merits of a gra ..read more
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Continuing Studies course, take 2
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
1M ago
A year and a half ago, I mentioned that I was going to teach a course through Rice's Glasscock School of Continuing Studies, trying to give a general audience introduction to some central ideas in condensed matter physics.  Starting in mid-March, I'm doing this again.  Here is a link to the course registration for this synchronous online class.  This course is also intended as a potential continuing education/professional development offering for high school teachers, community college instructors, and other educators, and thanks to the generous support of the NSF, the Glasscoc ..read more
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A couple of links + a thought experiment about spin
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
1M ago
A couple of interesting things to read: As someone interested in lost ancient literature and also science, I really liked this news article from Nature about progress in reading scrolls excavated from Herculaneum.  The area around the Bay of Naples was a quite the spot for posh Roman families, and when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, whole villas, complete with their libraries of books on papyrus scrolls, were buried and flash-cooked under pyroclastic flows.  Those scrolls now look like lump charcoal, but with modern x-ray techniques (CT scanning using the beam from a synchrotron) plus m ..read more
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Large magnetic fields as a scientific tool
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
1M ago
When I was at Berkeley at the beginning of the week to give a seminar, I was fortunate enough to overlap with their departmental physics colloquium by Greg Boebinger, an accomplished scientist who is also an extremely engaging and funny speaker.  Since 2004 he has been the director of the National High Magnetic Field Lab in Tallahassee, Florida, the premier user facility for access to large magnetic fields for scientific research.  He gave a great talk that discussed both the challenges in creating very large magnetic fields and a sampling of the cool science that can be done using t ..read more
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Generative AI and scientific images/diagrams
Nanoscale Views
by Douglas Natelson
2M ago
Generative AI for image generation is a controversial topic for many reasons.  Still, as someone who doesn't have a staff of graphic artists on hand to help make scientific illustrations, it has certainly been tempting to see whether it might be a useful tool.  My brief experiments are based using bing's integrated engine (which I believe is DALL-E 3) since Rice has a license.  The short summary:  Trying to make scientific illustrations this way is great at showing how this technology is not close to useful yet for this application.  While natively integrated w/ chatGP ..read more
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