Posted in 2015
First Lecture Advanced Quantum Mechanics
has been made today after a long break – 5 year break. I was delighted to get back to my favorite course, equipped with a text-book “Advanced Quantum Mechanics: A practical guide” by Jeroen Danon and me, the book that came out for the cost of so much time and energy.
The classroom was full: up to the last seat(!), it was pretty inspiring. The audience has reacted well on the questions and jokes: at least a part of it. The topic was a bit dry: we have refreshed ordinary quantum mechanics. To the end of the lecture there was a time problem, the end went too fast. Ok, I warned that the first three lectures are dry.
We’ll see what happens next.
Eduard Driessen
who is presently a postoc in Grenoble with Claude Chapelier has given a talk yesterday. He reported very recent results on low-temperature STM experiments with superconducting nanowires. It is a tremendous technical challenge he has overcame.
The results were many and various. Some were pretty familiar and irritating like the incomplete gap in this disordered superconductor: the thing that has an explanation, yet the explanation so primitive and far-fetched that you feel yourself ashamed that you can’t do it better. Some were generation-binding: the hot spots in superconducting wires have been hot topic in 70s when Eduard’s former supervisors Hans Mooij and Teun Klapwijk were at his stage of the career, and STM experiments of Eduard just neatly visualized the intimate structure of these spots.
Some were teasingly interesting. Eduard pushed a 1nA – tiny – current to the STM and observed a gigantic suppression of the critical current in the nanowire. It is like you add an extra droplet to a river stream – and it does not flow anymore. These droplets must be quasiparticles.
The result suggests that the quasiparticles accumulate being added at a rate of 10^7 per second. This is thus about slow quasiparticle dynamics – a topic of my long interest
Vacuum Cleaning
The floor in my office is covered with a carpet: I guess it’s about 40 years old, it keeps all small dirty sports of the period and displays all shades of bluish grey depending on the sun exposure accumulated for these years. It’s about a year that I noticed the carpet got dusty and dirty. The consultations revealed that this was a consequence of a renewed working agreement with the trade union of university cleaners.
Ok, a detail. Yet about two weeks ago I’ve noticed that I cough more because that much dust. I ask our secretary if I could get a vacuum cleaner somewhere in the building: if you want it good, you do it yourself. No, she said – this is not an option. Yet she promised to investigate the alternatives.
I quickly forgot about and kept coughing. Yet on Tuesday morning the cleaning lady brought the vacuum cleaner and asked politely whether she could perform the action. She did! My carpet has changed the color and it is unusually fresh in my room. Long live the university services!
Happy New Year
to you, dear reader. Let peace and harmony prevail every aspect of your life!
Today seems a good day to restart my business blog. Since I’m alive, it must go on too. Let me outline my main challenges for 2015 and wish you to confront your challenges as well.
In education, I restart the course on Advanced Quantum Mechanics after five-something year break. That used to be a success, yet the students have changed ever since – so I feel a thrill. The course will be based on my book with Jeroen Danon. Albert Gonzales and Michael Wimmer will help me this year with exercises, so I hope we’ll do it fine.
In research, I need to complete to the papers the ideas of 2014 that came to me and my co-authors – some of them are quite striking and eye-opening. I will apply for a relatively big grant of European Research Council which hopefully gives me some means to work on novel topological effects in multi-terminal Josephson junctions.
As to organization, my role would be modest – conform to my age, I will try to resist most if not all (bureaucratic)changes in the group and the department 🙂 The idea is that the changes that you cannot resist are really useful and necessary 😉 while the others …
In addition, have to confront a way more personal challenge: to cope with a long-standing emotional disbalance that, among other things, seriously affects my business efficiency. 2014 has brought the idea of solving this problem, and hopefully the solution can be implemented in 2015.
Actually, my promotion is pending now: I don’t know if or when it happens. In case it will, I’d get a very useful emotional boost.