Posted in 2010

has given today a talk at our Nanoscience seminar. I knew dr Taylor as being involved in collaborations that resulted in interesting and ground-breaking publications. I came to listen to him with high expectations.

With no exaggeration, this was the worst talk I ever attended. I’ve listened to more than a thousand scientific talks that have varied very much in skill, comprehensibility and general qualities. However in every case the speaker attempted to relate the subject of the talk to the previous research, put it in the context known, and from very beginning give a preview of the results. At least, explain the title of the talk. None of these four elements were present in the talk of dr Taylor. In the beginning, the speaker has encouraged the questions from the audience. So I have asked some: I could not know that the speaker encouraged questions just to ignore them.

Dr Taylor must be a respected scientist, and the talk might be quite illuminating at the end. Unfortunately, I cannot stay till the end: I just got very unpleasant feeling and left after forty minutes. I have not understood a slightest bit of it.

gave a talk in our department on Jan. 25. His research mostly concerns optical and paramagnetic excitation of impurity ions in transparent crystals like ruby or diamond (these ions determine colors of precious stones). It is an active research area with a nano-twist: people are trying to make nanoparticles out of the crystals so that there is a single ion per nanoparticle, position the particles,  connect them optically using metal strips, or put them into an artificial crystal (of nanometer period) that could provide localization of the photons emitted by the ion.

Several groups are (hyper)active in the area. Roman belongs to Jelezko team of TU Dresden. Roland Hanson, our yongest faculty, stands under banner of diamond quantum physics here at TU Delft.

Precisios stones fascinate and, reportedly, could even enslave your mind. As you know, there is a small nuclear reactor at TU. There were (and are) projects to make a commercial use of this rather unique facility. One of the projects was to change the color of precious stones by exposing them to radiation: sometimes a color change can change the market value of a stone by an order of magnitude (I mean, increase this value). Somehow this project did not go: was that because the diamonds shone too much after the exposure? 

gave a talk in our department on Jan. 13. He introduced for us spintronics of individual atoms. Using STM techniques, he was able to position magnetic atoms on a semi-insulating substrate. With the same STM, he can run currents through the atoms revealing their excited spin states. The most fascinating part of his talk described how to catch a magnetic atom at the STM tip and run the current through another atom on the substrate.

Sander Otte graduated from Leiden and has been promoted there. He is presently post doc in NIST Maryland. More about him/his research can be found at http://www.nist.gov/cnst/otte.cfm.

Thursday Jan 21 and Friday Jan 22 I have spent in Brussels, Universite Libre. There was a scientific school (!) for master students. I find the idea astonishing: if something like this happens in Delft, it usually consists of two-three lectures of a VERY popular level, a sort you can read in kindergarten without risking to tire kids. There in Brussel it was entirely different: all the lecturers invited kept presentation at scientific level. The students have been warned: the school is called "Understanding and exploiting COMPLEXITY at the nanoscale". Yet the attendance was spectacular, despite the fact that it was an examination week. I really love that French-speaking people are not afraid of looking clever.

Except me, the lectures came from statistical physics community, and their definition of "nanoscale" was rather different from others: they concern situations were the fluctuations of would-be macroscopic quantities are visible. For instance, this includes population genetics presented by Luca Peliti.  There was an interesting series of experimental lectures by Sergio Ciliberto.  I was talking about quantum transport, as usual.