Posted in 2010
Qubits in Altai mountains
do occur. It’s a second day I am here, in the heart of Altai, mysterious craddle of all turkish nations, among mistly forests, rocky hills, and unbelievably wild rivers: water seem to be boiling at all times.
There is a workshop in nanotech organized by people from Novosibirsk State Technical University. It is dominated by quantum superconducting devices and Russian-born scientists who work and live in West. The hidden agenga is perhaps the organizers wish to run a full-scale international conference, not sure about the place and use former compatriots as testers.
This is an unnecessary precaution: the place is well-run despite being in real wildreness, welcoming and the surroundings are magnificent. The only point it is a bit difficult to reach. We flew to Novosibirsk, that is an adventure by itself. Then we made a 10-hour bus ride through Siberian steppes. Those are usually dubbed cold. I wished it were true on that day: there were thirty in shadow, and there was hardly a shadow. It begun to rain only soon after we have reached the place…
more about Dresden
Let me summarize my impressions from Dresden workshop that I’ve left on 17-6-2010. Its official name was "Quantum Information Concepts for Condensed Matter Problems". It was very timely to consolidate an emerging community of condensed matter theorists: unfortunately there was just a single experimental talk, very good one but yet not in condensed matter.
The organizers where:
Ian Affleck (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
Masud Haque (MPIPKS Dresden, Germany)
Ulrich Schollwöck (LMU München, München, Germany)
A typical activity reported in the course of a workshop is to take a complicated many-boby wave function such as of Fractional Quantum Hall state, or Heisenberg chain, numerically compute entanglemet of a part of the system, and compare it with known theoretical predictions. Both making predictions and computing is challenging and difficult. The expectation is that the activity will let us understand more about the properties and internal structure of the complicated many-body states, and it looks like there is some progress here.
Another activity is connected to the words "quantum quench": perhaps the most buzzing word combination at the conference. In this case, the dynamics of entanglement is of interest. The value to predict/compute is the change of entanglement that takes place when two parts of the system are connected and disconnected. This is related to my attempts to study the transport of quantum information quantities.
Dresden workshop entanglement
is where I am now. It’s not quite my usual community, this makes talks challenging to follow and people interesting to meet. The community is not quantum-informational either: mostly participants are condensed matter theorists interested in application of quantum informational quantities to complicated many-body wavefunctions. My talk yesterday was about the current research on tunneling of Renyi entropies. I also gave a general overview of my own research agenda in this direction. It was so entertaining to talk about these future plans that I’ve lost the feeling of time. It did not happen to me recently that I could present only a half of the talk…
Some people came over here from the recent workshop in Osterreich and brought good news about Alina and Ciprian: looks they manage to produce a good impression and made me happy thereby.
Visit Levitov
Leonid Levitov was visiting this week wednesday-thursday.
Leonid Levitov is a brilliant theorist with persistent interest to experimental problems. He is employed in MIT. I know him quite long: we have had the same supervisor, Gerasim Eliashberg, at Landau Institute in eighties of the century past.
The visit has happened rather unexpectedly. I wrote to Leonid asking a question about his recent work, the answer was important for me. He answered he could not think of it since he’s packing a suitcase to go to Europe. Yet my mail brought him to a good idea: to include Delft into his European tournee.
That was great. We’ve got a nice and very fruitful discussion about entanglement production: it went through several stages and will perhaps result in a small collaborative project. Yet I was not only one to profit from his presence: Leonid has many contacts in Delft, like Hans Mooij and Teun Klapwijk and is always eager to make new ones. So he performed like a chess master giving a show of simultaneous games: he quickly changed from one "opponent" to another.
Leonid also gave a seminar about a plausible scenario of exciton condensation in bilayer graphene.
Chekhov’s jubilee
Anniversary of graduation
is hardly celebrated, have you ever even remembered that, dear reader?
Yet I’m proud to belong to a small community where this anniversary does matter. I graduated from Moscow Physical-Technical Institute and in my first years I’ve been specializing in experimental physics of elementary particles. Though I changed this towards the end of the course, I still kept the links with old friends. On May 29th, 1982 we had a marvelous deep-night picnic celebrating the graduation. That outing was so sucsessful that it would be a sin not to repeat it in a year, and then in a year, so it became a tradition that helps us to bear the rush of years…
My friends have been scattered over the world, some in US, some in RU, and some in a micro-state called CERN that borders France and Switzerland. The celebration still goes on, tough this year at Swiss site only. I wish I could be present: these memories are sweet.
Departure Raoul Bino
Our dean Raoul Bino leaves his post from June 1. He was executing the function for nine full months.
There are traditions everywhere, there are traditions in Delft. It comes frequently that people are so immersed in a tradition as to regard it as a law of Nature. I’ve seen many deans in Delft, and for many I know from personal experience that they are gentle, intellectual and compassionary beings. Yet everybody, while in function, found it appropriate to wear a sort of ritual mask, a kind of Europeans buy for an African ritual mask, you know, that with frightening features and long sharp teeth. I never saw Raoul Bino wearing this mask, though in the course of his deanship he had to make tough decisions. I liked this fact and hoped he’d stay longer with us.
Fare well, Raoul, full suscess with managing Agro- and Food Sciences, we know you’ll do it well.
Pentecost
finally, all controversies have been resolved, and we could come together praying of sending Holy Spirit to us. What a joy! What a wonderful feast! I feel like a kid rejoycing. Happy Birthday,the whole Church of our Savior! As it’s been said: whatever high the separation walls between the Christians may seem, they do not reach the Heaven. Let us enjoy the day, all followers of God who makes wonders. Let us hope that we witness these wonders, that they become a part of our life, and will bring us to Christ like wings propelled by fresh wind.
Glory to God.
AQM book: magnet gets magnons
As mentioned, Jeroen Danon and me are writting a book on Advanced Quantum Mechanics. We are expanding and elaborating exsisting lecture notes, making it more complete and interesting.
There was a lecture on magnets introducing many-body trial wave function and spontaneous symmetry breaking. Some time ago we got an idea to add magnons to this Chapter thereby introducing Goldstone boson idea, a bit of gauge techniques and random phase approximation. It looked like two-day job, but it took most of my working time for the last two weeks. This included refreshing master-level physics I happened to need, and analythical and numerical evaluation of magnon spectrum: something I always wanted to do but never dared to.
Despite a huge time loss, I enjoyed the activity, perhaps even more than the "real" research.
Top 100 scientists 2010
yes, here am I, in this prestigiuos list, perhaps just opening it. Finally noticed by International Bibliographical Centre. Very good for my career.
The only detail is that this is a so-called phony award, I’d pay for silver medal "designed by regalia-makers to the World’s Monarchies" and certificate (and I won’t), and the distinction will not be made public. Some people are upset while receiving such spam. However, others proudly include those in their CV’s along with real awards. That’s wise because everything is vanity.