# Monthly Archives: April 2016

## SciPost

Recently, I was invited to sign up for SciPost, an online platform similar to the arXiv. However, the major difference is that SciPost is creating a suite of free and open-access peer-reviewed online journals. Moreover, copyrights will be held by the authors of the papers, and not by publishers.

Publications will be free for both authors and readers. The journal articles will be completely open to everyone.

To be honest, such a platform has probably been a long time coming for our community. The FAQ page on the website states that SciPost is launching because:

The publishing landscape is evolving rapidly, and it is not clear that the best interests of science and scientists are being represented. SciPost offers a grassroots solution to the problem of scientific publishing, designed and implemented by scientists in the best interests of science itself.

SciPost is open for submissions starting June 2016. I sincerely hope that those in charge of SciPost have it running smoothly by then and that it reaches the critical mass to be successful. Good luck to the team and particularly J.-S. Caux, the condensed matter theorist who started this endeavor.

## Loudspeaker Crossover

The goal of an audio speaker is to reproduce the sound of the input as best as possible. This may sound like a simple statement, but it is a notoriously difficult one to engineer. Furthermore, sound to peoples’ ears is subjective, which only serves to complicate this task.

Today, with currently available technology, it is not possible to reproduce a flat frequency response across the entire spectrum of sound within the human-audible regime (i.e. ~20Hz to ~20kHz) with a single driving cone. This is why a decent set of speakers usually comprise two or more components, for example, a sub-woofer and a tweeter. The sub-woofer plays low-frequency sound, while the tweeter plays the high-frequency sound, which you would probably guess just from the onomatopoeic value of their names. Here is an example of a sound pressure level vs. frequency graph for this sub-woofer:

Black Line: Sound Pressure Level in dB vs. Frequency

You can see that the sound level dies off dramatically at higher frequencies, which is why we need the tweeter. For those that are curious, the plots like the one above are usually obtained by hanging a microphone in front of the speaker cone in an anechoic chamber and sweeping through the frequencies with a frequency generator. Due to the directional nature of sound from a speaker, the microphone is hung directly in front of the cone at a distance of 1 meter.

Because sound has to be routed through two separate cones, the speaker manufacturer has to make an electronics decision about how to do this. The electronics components that are used to do this are usually referred to as the “crossover circuit”. This is really just a fancy name for a high- and low-pass filter (or band-pass filter if one is also using a mid-range speaker). Crossover circuits tend to come in two varieties: active and passive. Active crossovers usually use operational amplifiers (or op-amps) to make the filters (which require the use of external power), while passive crossovers use inductors and capacitors (and do not need to be plugged into the wall).

For the sake of simplicity, let’s suppose that we have both 8 Ohm tweeters and sub-woofers for our speaker system. Suppose we want our cross-over frequency to be 500Hz. We can make the world’s simplest high-pass filter like so for the tweeter:

High-Pass Filter

So what would the capacitance need to be? Well, simply enough, it’s just the cut-off frequency of an RC circuit. In this case, for the 500 Hz crossover, we can calculate it as so:

$f_c = \frac{1}{2 \pi R*C} = \frac{1}{2 \pi *8*C}$

Solving for $C$ with $f_c$ = 500 Hz gives 39.79$\mu F$.

For the sub-woofer’s low-pass filter, we would replace the capacitor with the inductor and the equation would be $f_c = \frac{L}{2 \pi R}$. I should mention that these simple circuits also give one a 6dB/octave rolloff. This point is explained well on Wikipedia, so I don’t think I need to repeat it here.

The stunning thing about this simple passive crossover is that manufacturers can make a set of pretty high-end speakers with just these circuits. Of course, one would have to use some reasonable capacitors and inductors — but it can be that simple.

Manufacturers have many other design considerations besides the electronics to make as well (such as the enclosure!), but I hope this helps you understand the basics of what’s inside your speaker box.

## Is it really as bad as they say?

It’s been a little while since I attended A.J. Leggett’s March Meeting talk (see my review of it here), and some part of that talk still irks me. It is the portion where he referred to “the scourge of bibliometrics”, and how it prevents one from thinking about long-term problems.

I am not old enough to know what science was like when he was a graduate student or a young lecturer, but it seems like something was fundamentally different back then. The only evidence that I can present is the word of other scientists who lived through the same time period and witnessed the transformation (there seems to be a dearth of historical work on this issue).

It was easy for me to find articles corroborating Leggett’s views, unsurprisingly I suppose. In addition to the article I linked last week by P. Nozieres, I found interviews with Sydney Brenner and Peter Higgs, and a damning article by P.W. Anderson in his book More and Different entitled Could Modern America Have Invented Wave Mechanics? In his opinion piece, Anderson also refers to an article by L. Kadanoff expressing a similar sentiment, which I was not able to find online (please let me know if you find it, and I’ll link it here!). The conditions described at Bell Labs in David Gertner’s book The Idea Factory also paint a rather stark contrast to the present status of condensed matter physics.

Since I wasn’t alive back then, I really cannot know with any great certainty whether the current state of affairs has impeded me from pursuing a longer-term project or thinking about more fundamental problems in physics. I can only speak for myself, and at present I can openly admit that I am incentivized to work on problems that I can solve in 2-3 years. I do have some concrete ideas for longer-term projects in mind, but I cannot pursue these at the present time because, as an experimentalist and postdoc, I do not have the resources nor the permanent setting in which to complete this work.

While the above anecdote is personal and it may corroborate the viewpoints of the aforementioned scientists, I don’t necessarily perceive all these items as purely negative. I think it is important to publish a paper based on one’s graduate work. It should be something, however small, that no one has done before. It is important to be able to communicate with the scientific community through a technical paper — writing is an important part of science. I also don’t mind spending a few years (not more than four, hopefully!) as a postdoc, where I will pick up a few more tools to add to my current arsenal. This is something that Sydney Brenner, in particular, decried in his interview. However, it is likely that most of what was said in these articles was aimed at junior faculty.

Ultimately, the opinions expressed by these authors is concerning. However, I am uncertain as to the extent to which what is said is exaggeration and the extent to which it is true. Reading these articles has made me ask how the scientific environment I was trained in (US universities) has shaped my attitude and scientific outlook.

One thing is undoubtedly true, though. If one chooses to resist the publish-or-perish trend by working on long-term problems and not publishing, the likelihood of landing an academic job is close to null. Perhaps this is the most damning consequence. Nevertheless, there is still some outstanding experimental and theoretical science done today, some of it very fundamental, so one should not lose all hope.

Again, I haven’t lived through this academic transformation, so if anyone has any insight concerning these issues, please feel free to comment.

## What’s NDT Been Up To?

Readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of what Neil DeGrasse Tyson does for science in the public eye. Recently, he sent out a couple tweets, which I thought were hilarious that I thought I’d share here as well. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did!

## Timing

Rather than being linear, the historical progression of topics in physics sometimes takes a tortuous route. There are two Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics articles, one by P. Nozieres and one by M. Dresselhaus, that describe how widespread interest on certain subjects in the study of condensed matter were affected by timing.

In the article by Dresselhaus, she notes that HP Boehm and co-workers had actually isolated monolayer graphene back in 1962 (pdf!, and in German). On the theoretical front, P. Nozieres says in his article:

But neither I nor any of these famous people ever suspected what was hiding behind that linear dispersion. Fifty years later, graphene became a frontier of physics with far-reaching quantum effects.

Dresselhaus also mentions that carbon nanotubes were observed in 1952 in Russia followed by another reported discovery in the 1970s by M. Endo. These reports occurred well before its rediscovery in 1991 by Iijima that sparked a wealth of studies. The controversy over the discovery of nanotubes actually seems to date back even further, perhaps even to 1889 (pdf)!

In the field of topological insulators, again there seems to have been an oversight from the greater condensed matter physics community. As early as 1985, in the Soviet journal JETP, B.A. Volhov and O.A. Pankratov discussed the possibility of Dirac electrons at the surface between a normal band-gap semiconductor and an “inverted” band-gap semiconductor (pdf). Startlingly, the authors suggest CdHgTe and PbSnSe as materials in which to investigate the possibility. A HgTe/(Hg,Cd)Te quantum well hosted the first definitive observation of the quantum spin hall effect, while the Pb$_{1-x}$Sn$_x$Se system was later found to be a topological crystalline insulator.

One can probably find many more examples of historical inattention if one were to do a thorough study. One also wonders what other kinds of gems are hidden within the vastness of the scientific literature. P. Nozieres notes that perhaps the timing of these discoveries has something to do with why these initial discoveries went relatively unnoticed:

When a problem is not ripe you simply do not see it.

I don’t know how one quantifies “ripeness”, but he seems to be suggesting that the perceived importance of scientific works are correlated in some way to the scientific zeitgeist. In this vein, it is amusing to think about what would have happened had one discovered, say, topological insulators in Newton’s time. In all likelihood, no one would have paid the slightest attention.