April 2024
- Expt 10) Antiferromagnetism — the original “hidden order”
- Expt 9) Soft phonons at continuous structural phase transitions
March 2024
- Expt 8) Metal-insulator transitions
- Expt 7) Resistance minimum and the Kondo effect
- Expt 6) Superfluidity in 4He
- Expt 5) Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect and, separately, persistent currents
February 2024
- Expt 4) Electrical noise is quantified in 1928
- Expt 3) Electron diffraction
- Expt 2) X-ray diffraction from crystals
- Expt 1) Superconductivity in Hg in 1911
- Landmark experiments in condensed matter physics
October 2021
September 2021
June 2021
September 2020
June 2020
May 2020
March 2020
December 2019
August 2019
August 2018
February 2018
January 2018
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
July 2017
- Response and Dissipation: Part 1 of the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem
- Research Topics and the LAQ Method
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
- The Physicist’s Proof II: Limits and the Monty Hall Problem
- An Undergraduate Optics Problem – The Brewster Angle
- Spot the Difference
- Book Review – The Gene
March 2017
February 2017
- Discovery vs. Q&A Experiments
- An Excellent Intro to Physical Science
- Some Gems
- Nonlinear Response and Harmonics
January 2017
- Citizen First, Scientist Second
- Electron-Hole Droplets
- Disorganized Reflections
- Landau Theory and the Ginzburg Criterion
December 2016
- Holiday Puzzle
- Fractional Quasiparticles and Reality
- A Staple of the Italian Diet
- Strontium Titanate — A Historical Tour
- Wannier-Stark Ladder, Wavefunction Localization and Bloch Oscillations
November 2016
October 2016
- Halloween Humor…
- Bohr-van Leeuwen Theorem and the Micro/Macro Disconnect
- LST Relation – The Physical Picture
- Too Close to Home
- An Interesting Research Avenue, an Update and a Joke
September 2016
- Gibbs Paradox and Epicycles
- Lunar Eclipse and the 22 Degree Halo
- Precision in Many-Body Systems
- On Science and Meaning
August 2016
- Coupled and Synchronized Metronomes
- Acoustic Plasmon
- Trite but True
- Data Representation and Trust
- Drought
- What Life is Like in Grad School…
- Field Biologists
- Friedel Sum Rule and Phase Shifts
July 2016
- Ruminations on Raman
- Goodhart’s Law Gone Wrong…
- Goodhart’s Law and Citation Metrics
- Approximate Humor
- Transistors, Logic and Abstraction
- Angular Momentum and Harmonic Oscillators
- Correlated Electrons GRC
June 2016
- Schrodinger’s Cat and Macroscopic Quantum Mechanics
- The Mystery of URu2Si2 – Experimental Dump
- Crises in Confidence
- Neither Energy Gap Nor Meissner Effect Imply Superflow
- Science for Science’s Sake
May 2016
- Breadth Vs. Depth
- Lift Off
- European League Underdogs
- Diffraction, Babinet and Optical Transforms
- With Great Beam Time Comes Great Humor
- Broken Symmetry and Degeneracy
- John Oliver on Science
- A View From an X-ray Beam
- Phase Difference After Resonance
April 2016
- SciPost
- Loudspeaker Crossover
- Is it really as bad as they say?
- What’s NDT Been Up To?
- Timing
- A First-Rate Experiment: The Damon-Eshbach Mode
- Flash Boys: A Few Lessons
March 2016
- A Graphical Depiction of Linear Response
- Paradigm Shifts and the Scourge of Bibliometrics
- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of STEM
- Gravitational Waves Made Easy
- Private Sector Careers from a Physics PhD
- Perception
Feb 2016
- The Most Surprising Consequences of Quantum Mechanics
- A Matter of Definitions
- A Glimpse into the Renormalization Group
- Just a little thought of Aharonov-Bohm Destruction of Superconductivity
- Beam Time Humor
- Visualization and Analogies
- History and a Q&A Approach
- Reproducing Experiments
- A Physicist’s Proof
January 2016
- Neil Degrasse Tyson Vs. Rapper B.o.B
- Science and Hype
- Origin of the solitary wave
- An Integral from the SSH Model
- Envisioning the Future Technological Landscape
- Reflecting on General Ideas
- Sounding Out Krakatoa
- What is Scientific Consensus?
- Cost of a College Education
December 2015
- The Unswattable
- A Much Needed Textbook Overhaul
- The Relationship Between Causality and Kramers-Kronig Relations
- Interactions, Collective Excitations and a Few Examples
- Matthias’ List — Check it Twice
- On the Lighter Side…
- Some Words on Sum Rules
November 2015
- Misconduct and The Wire
- Neutron Scattering and Cuprates
- Hunches and Feelings
- Balibar and his Beef with Science Magazine’s Depiction of a BEC
- Why Was BCS So Important?
- In Favor of Graduate Years in Lab Versus Data-Taking at a Synchrotron
- Excitons in Cuprous Oxide
October 2015
- Macroscopic Wavefunctions, Off-Diagonal Long Range Order and U(1) Symmetry Breaking
- A Critical Ingredient for Cooper Pairing in Superconductors within the BCS Picture
- Another Lesson from the Coupled Oscillator: Fano Lineshape
- The truth we all know but agree not to talk about
- A Rather Illuminating Experiment Using Ultrafast Lasers
- Things Everyone has Thought of, or Actually done, on an Exam
- Do We Effectively Disseminate “Gems of Insight”?
- The Shortcoming of Our Experimental Probes
- Some Questions that Arose During My Graduate Years
September 2015
- Does Frivolity Border on the Edge of Creativity?
- Condensed Matter Physics in the Eyes of the Public: A Note from N.P. Armitage
- Lessons from the Coupled Oscillator
- Why are the quantum mechanical effect of sound observed in most solids but not in most liquids?
- What Happens in 2D Stays in 2D.
- Net Attraction à la Bardeen-Pines and Kohn-Luttinger
- Draw me a picture of a Cooper Pair
- Guest Post
- So Much for New Principles at Higher Scales…
- General Aspects of Topology in Quantum Mechanics
August 2015
- Thoughts on Consistency and Physical Approximations
- Potential Women Nobelists
- A Plea for More Plots of the Energy Loss Function
- Bardeen, CDWs and Macroscopic Quantum Phenomena
- Toyota, General Motors and the Quest for Quality
- Excitonic Insulator
- Transition Metal Dichalcogenide CDWs
- Lost in Translation
- The Prescience of Ginzburg
- Plasmons of a Luttinger Liquid
- What DO We Know About High Tc?
July 2015
- Kohn Anomalies and Fermi Surfaces
- Private Communication
- Screening, Plasmons and LO-TO Splitting: One Last Time
- Emergence is about the failure of upward heritability
- Transport Signatures in Charge Density Wave Systems
- Let there be (THz) light
- Frank Wilczek’s Concept of Upward Inheritance
- Metrics Subject to Manipulation
- Quantized Vortices in Superfluid 4He
- Theory of Everything – Laughlin and Pines
- An Important Note on Cuprates
- Modern Theory of Polarization
- Just a Little Thought on TKNN
- Social and Moral Responsibility of a Scientist
- Physics Over Formalism
June 2015
- Staying cool this summer
- Merchants of Doubt
- A Little More on LO-TO Splitting
- Plasmons, the Coulomb Interaction and a Gap
- Neil deGrasse Tyson on NASA Funding
- Hume’s Uniformity of Nature
- Spin Fluctuations in the Cuprates
- It’s Not Just a (Berry) Phase
- Sonoluminescence
- Picasso’s Work Explored by Infrared and X-ray Radiation
- Unusual Properties of Rare Earth Tritellurides
- Declining Basic Science in the US
- Insights from the Cooper Problem
- Avoided Crossings, Level Repulsion or Anti-Crossing
May 2015
- Beckett and Science
- What THE WIRE Taught Me About Science
- Floquet States on Topological Insulator Surfaces
- Was the Higgs Boson Discovered in 1980?
- How do we define states of matter?
- Battle of the Public Physicists
- Open-Access Publications
- Plastic Fantastic
- Sign problems, Terry Tau, and open science
- The Value of “Wasting Time”
- Do “Theorems” in Condensed Matter Physics Limit the Imagination?
- The Embarrassing Scarcity of Women in Our Field
- Density Wave with d-Form Factor an Answer to the Mysterious Pseudogap?
- The Value of a Null Result II
- The Value of a Null Result
- Data and Plots for the Public
- Simple, Beautiful and Decisive
April 2015