Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Copying text without attribution is plagiarism.

Amazingly, there are graduate-level students out there who do not understand this simple, basic fact. When you're writing a scholastic or scientific document, you never copy other people's words - certainly not complete verbatim sentences - without clear attribution and indication that you're quoting someone else. You just don't. Ever. Doing so is plagiarism, and as any kind of professional you should know that it's wrong. Amazingly, some students don't seem to get this point, even when they've been told about this, explicitly, repeatedly, and actually signed documents attesting that they understand this, and when they know that the professor can use this amazing tool called google to figure this sort of thing out.

Just. Don't. Do. It.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Come on, AAAS

I'm a member of the AAAS, in part because I support their various efforts, and in part because I like my subscription to Science. However, at least three times a year, I get junk mail at my house or at my departmental address, asking me if I'd like to join AAAS for the low new-member rate of $99/yr. How can these geniuses not realize that I'm already a member? I have an unusual last name, and they already have both my work and home addresses on file. Can't they tell that Prof. Douglas Natelson and Mr. Douglas Natelson with identical addresses are the same person? They must waste hundreds of dollars in postage and thousands of pieces of paper doing this, since I'm sure I'm not the only one getting these useless mailings. Good grief, folks, just do a sensible search on your mailing database for duplicates.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

AMO physics coolness

I saw two things in Science this week that I found quite interesting. First was a mention in Editor's Choice of this paper from my old stomping grounds at Stanford. The arxiv version is here. The idea is another great example of using essentially table-top physics (if you have a large, stainless steel vacuum chamber and lasers on your table) to test the limits of the Standard Model of particle physics, usually the domain of the high energy folks. Here's the story: there are many weird alternatives to the standard model where things like charge quantization (the idea that charge comes in chunks of exactly -e for electrons, and +e for protons, for example) and charge neutrality are approximate rather than exact, due to the breaking of some far out symmetries at very high energy scales. This paper points out that this idea can be tested very precisely (to 1 part in 1028) using interferometry of Bose-condensed atoms. In an optical interferometer, light (consider only one particular color) is split into two beams that take different paths, and then recombined. As light travels on each path, you can figure out how much phase the light waves accumulate by dividing the pathlength by the wavelength (and multiplying by 2 pi if you want your phase to be in radians). The intensity when the beams are recombined is proportional to the cos of the phase difference between the paths. This can be an incredibly precise way of measuring relative path lengths, and is essential to lots of modern technology. In the proposed experiment, the Bose-condensed atoms act like matter waves, and the idea is to do the same thing. However, in quantum mechanics the phase difference that builds up is related not just to the path length, but also picks up a contribution due to the (integrated) difference in (potential) energy (times time, divided by hbar) between the two paths. This is the way AMO and neutron interferometry measurements of gravity work: send waves along paths at different heights and recombine them, and the phase difference will include a contribution proportional to (m g h) where m is the mass of the particles, g is the gravitational acceleration, and h is the height difference. In the proposed experiment the atom waves are sent through regions of different electrostatic potential (voltage). If the atoms aren't exactly neutral, the voltage will couple to their charge and lead to a phase difference that would otherwise be absent. It's very elegant, and may be a way to test advanced high energy ideas without TeV particle accelerators.

The second bit that I read was this article about the race to use cold fermionic atoms trapped in optical lattices as a means of implementing condensed matter models of interesting systems (e.g., the Hubbard model of high-Tc superconductors). The theoretical models are computationally nightmarish to solve exactly, in large part because of the Fermi-Dirac statistics problem that the correct many-body wavefunctions must pick up a minus sign if the positions of any two electrons are swapped. The plan is to implement what are basically analog computers - cold atom systems that can be poked, prodded, and tuned - to map out the solutions. Using tunable model systems to explore strong correlations in quantum matter also happens to be the focus of Rice's Keck Program in Quantum Materials. (One note for regular commenter Sylow: now do you believe me that there is a DARPA program on this?)

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Career comments











Sunday, April 13, 2008

Talk this week

First, to the readers of this blog, thanks for the recent trend of posting informative links in the comments. I think that this really adds something to the discussion. One tip: in the comments you're allowed to use html tags, so if you want to post a link with a long URL, you may want to write the html that actually posts the link.

This week we had a fun physics colloquium given by Paul Canfield of Ames Lab and Iowa State University. He spoke about the discovery and characterization of new materials, with a particular emphasis on heavy fermion compounds, but with a significant discussion of MgB2 as well. His main purpose was to convey how physicists like him think and approach problems, and I think he succeeded. He also had a funny slide called "Periodic Table According to Most Physicists" that looked roughly like this:

H H' (almost like hydrogen)
H'' H''' C H'''' H'''''
Metals Cu


Elements that may not even be real

|<---Not on the final exam --->|
|<---Stuff for bombs -------->|

Amusing stuff.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Your tax dollars at work.

Like many of my colleagues, I review lots of grant proposals. Recently I was asked to review one for the Department of Energy, and when I said 'yes', they sent me the proposal. By Federal Express. On a CD. Now, you might wonder why, if they don't mind me ending up with this in an electronic format anyway, and if they want me to send in my review electronically, they wouldn't just handle this purely over the web, and save the money and environmental impact of shipping a CD from northern VA to Houston. Ahh well.

Friday, April 04, 2008

Talks this week

I saw some very good talks this week. First up was a physics colloquium by Stuart Parkin from IBM Almaden. In some very real sense, you're reading this because of Parkin - he and his team were the people who first took giant magnetoresistance (GMR) and developed it into a useful technology in the read heads of hard disk drives. The remarkable explosion in data storage capacity over the last decade and a half is largely due to this advance, possibly the best example of true nanotechnology (the film thicknesses involved in spin valves are a few nm) making it out of the lab and into manufacturing and consumer products. Their later work on tunneling magnetoresistance has also now been transferred into hard drive read heads. In fact, TMR heads with MgO tunnel barriers between ferromagnetic layers can have room temperature resistance changes of several hundred percent in the presence of few-Oersted fields like those from drive media. After reviewing all of this at just the right level, Parkin went on to talk a bit about his latest ideas and work on high performance "racetrack" memory. In this idea, a single transistor cell can be responsible for reading and writing tens of bits of memory (as opposed to one in current RAM designs). The bits are stored as domain walls in a ferromagnetic nanowire. The walls can be detected through their local change in the magnetization, and they can be moved by pulsing spin-polarized currents through the ferromagnetic wires. All in all, a great colloquium - one of my colleagues wished that we'd taped it so that we could show it to job candidates as an example of a real general audience colloquium.

There was also a workshop on campus this week about probabilistic and nanoscale computing that featured some nice talks. One of the best was by Tom Theis, head of physical sciences research at IBM, who reviewed their latest developments and the future of the field-effect transistor from his perspective. Anyone who has alternative ideas in mind about computing technologies really needs to do their homework by listening to someone like Theis, who has perspective about the science as well as the economic and manufacturing issues.