rock, especially in carbon nanotubes: our paper with Izak Snyman has been accepted for PRL today. Please search this blog for 'polarons' to find out the whole story. It took a bit less than eight months and three rounds of the referee reports. The research made is quite simple in fact, while the referees, especially one, have been very curious about every detail so that our communications exceeded the volume of the paper by a factor of five.

Chirst is born, dear reader, after all for me as well. I'm happy with my family and ready for all wonders of this year.

to you, dear reader! I wish you not to get bored, and not to loose your mood in all troubles the year might provide. The Lord will look after us all, just keep fit and open to him.

All right, it's almost time, time to think of good and bad, achievements and losses, old and new, whatever silly it is.

My Lord kept me and keen reasonably healthy and active. Kids gladden my heart. I could enjoy love and friendship. As to research, six papers have been published, two in PRL. We have made 11 arxiv submissions. I got 475 citations this year reaching h-index of 47. I'm happy I could work on Renyi entropies and hope to continue with this, we cracked the polaron in carbon nanotube. I've learned about several interesting experiments to think of and had a couple of prospective ideas. I made into several very good grant application teams, this schould work over a time. I collaborated with visitors, Izak Snyman and Tomohiro Yokoyama.

On negative side, my laziness and lack of feeling for my neighbour yet prevail. I could not finish papers I would have to, no grant application was sucsessful, many things planned have been smoothly transferred to next year plans. One of my best scienific achivements has not been sufficiently appreciated. The "weather" for research becomes increasingly bad: less and less money for real science. And overall "wheather" might be better, with all signs of economical and political instability appearing as ugly blotches at the made-up face of our prosperous civilization, that accompany signs of moral degradation and devotion to sin.

And my own aging, on the top of all. Less people smile at my jokes and understand my motives. Less news in my life, all runs along the trajectories known, and to my astonishment I even do not get bored with this...

Challengies for next year. I have to finish the book with Jeroen, and pretty soon. I need to learn how to run the group, and actually why. And grant applications, articles, students finishing, students (hopefully) coming... I just do not want to be boring, you know.

is a title of new submission we made with Dima Pikulin. Interesting and simple dymanical effect in a Josephson qubit that we called any-pi Josephson effect. Please find it here.

The abstract is as follows:We derive a generic phenomenological model of a Majorana Josephson junction that accounts for avoided crossing of Andreev states, and investigate its dynamics at constant bias voltage to reveal an unexpected pattern of any-\pi\ Josephson effect in the limit of slow decoherence.

is a title of new arxiv submission made with Ciprian and Han Keijzers, PhD student from Quantum Transport group. This summarizes our long activity in course of which we strove to be close to experiment and the experiment strove for perfectness. This has not quite work yet, however the results are interesting and useful: certainly, they are for generations to come. Please read it here

The abstract: We study theoretically dynamics in a Josephson junction coupled to a mechanical resonator looking at the signatures of the resonance in d.c. electrical response of the junction. Such a system can be realized experimentally as a suspended ultra-clean carbon nanotube brought in contact with two superconducting leads. A nearby gate electrode can be used to tune the junction parameters and to excite mechanical motion. We augment theoretical estimations with the values of setup parameters measured in the samples fabricated. We show that charging effects in the junction give rise to a mechanical force that depends on the superconducting phase difference. The force can excite the resonant mode provided the superconducting current in the junction has oscillating components with a frequency matching the resonant frequency of the mechanical resonator. We develop a model that encompasses the coupling of electrical and mechanical dynamics. We compute the mechanical response (the effect of mechanical motion) in the regime of phase bias and d.c. voltage bias. We thoroughly investigate the regime of combined a.c. and d.c. bias where Shapiro steps are developed and reveal several distinct regimes characteristic for this effect. Our results can be immediately applied in the context of experimental detection of the mechanical motion in realistic superconducting nano-mechanical devices.

most part of the pre-holiday and holiday period has been devoted to writting the articles: two more will appear on arxiv soon, and I can concentrate on grant applications and book stuff...Oh.

I would not survive this if there are no kind people who do some amateur culture about me, mostly Russian-language.

Our theater collective got a real tour! On 25-12-2011 we have performed our hit Jubilee right in the heart of Dutch civilization, city of Almere. It was a separate deep esthetical impression to see a common Dutch living room to be converted to an improvised theather for twenty some spectactors, that contributed much to our sucsess.

And today we have had a poetry reading party to commemorate Joseph Brosdky: not on occasion of a date, it just appears that plenty of Russians around are refined enough to like him to the extent of chanting his poems. It was a turn of our living room to swell.

Both Jubilee and Brodsky have appeared in my blog several times already, well, life is a repetition, is it not?

I have not written to the blog for about a month. A fact which is not a direct consequence of this, but related to this is that Ciprian, Fabian Hassler and me have finally accomplished a long paper entitled as above. You can find it on the Arxiv.

The topic is hot, and the paper could have been short, yet we have discovered on time that a part of our results have been already obtained in optical context.

The abstract is as follows:Motivated by recent experiments, we study theoretically the full counting statistics of radiation emitted below the threshold of parametric resonance in a Josephson junction circuit. In contrast to most optical systems, a significant part of emitted radiation can be collected and converted to an output signal. This permits studying the correlations of the radiation. To quantify the correlations, we derive a closed expression for full counting statistics in the limit of long measurement times. We demonstrate that the statistics can be interpreted in terms of uncorrelated bursts each encompassing 2N photons, this accounts for the bunching of the photon pairs produced in course of the parametric resonance. We present the details of the burst rates. In addition, we study the time correlations within the bursts and discuss experimental signatures of the statistics deriving the frequency-resolved cross-correlations.

Today David van Woerkom en Martin Steunebrink have sucsessfully passed the exam in Fairy Tales. Congratulations!

graduated today. She was the first master student of Leo Di Carlo in his function as prof in Delft, and of Diego Riste in his function as phd student. So all three received deserved congratulations today.

Josephine was instumental in desinging, checking and measuring 3d superconducting cavities that serve as unbelievably high-quality resonators to play qubit games with. I never saw Lorentian shapes that fit so tightly. The cavities hosted already some qubits of a record-long decay time and they promise to revolutionize the field.

Good luck to Josephine with her future. When her grandson boasts with his last acquision,a supercool quantum ipad, she may be able to recognize her desing and he may believe her.