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This international workshop we have organized with Wolfgang Belzig and Michel Devoret has ended succesfully, mostly because of local organizer Katrin Lantsch. We got quite some enthousiastic responses and are basically satisfied. Time allows I will blog the notes I made last week.

has been visiting the department today. Guess it’s been quite a preparation for him since he conquered many hearts of our faculty. His talk was prepared in a color scheme that I by the lack of experience regarded as gothic: However, the students have corrected me.

Anton combines intellegence and ambition with a great deal of flexibility and does not drink alcohol. I foresee splendid future for him.

This is a title of my contribution to the last Kavli Newsletter. I’ve written it a while ago and almost forgotten about, yet Huub Salemink was as kind as to remind me today. Here it goes:

The immediate motive to write this column is evident: J.E. Mooij was awarded the Fritz London prize. And though he has to wait for half a year to get his hands on it, we are all glad, consider it as our common achievement, and congratulate him from the depth of our common heart. Yet here I’d like to attempt a deeper study that, for the absence of exact microscopic theory, is bound to be phenomenological. By virtue of this approach, I have to disregard any personal detail however important it might seem.

The phenomenon of Fritz London is evident and lies within penetration depth. Foreign experience cannot be underestimated: it took only a year for this 1933 refugee to come up with a seminal theoretical contribution to superconductivity theory, long before this theory came into existence. It was a gem of phenomenology and implied a professorship. But how could an émigré penetrate the hearts of Duke colleagues so deeply as to make Fritz into a prize? When John Bardeen got this prize he did not hide it in his pocket; after a while, he returned back an amount 10 times greater to the prize fund, and that was no grant money. While we do not know what attracted him that strongly, it is well established that superconductivity, and thus research thereupon, requires attractive interactions.

The phenomenon of Hans Mooij is perhaps more complicated and certainly less explored. Why would a successful Shell employee run back to science? And if really looking for science, why would he run to a place where leading professors were not burdened with Ph.D. titles and published only once every two years in a local journal? And, if adjusted to such an environment, why work persistently at changing it into a Nature-publishing collective where almost any Ph.D. is a professor? Why, upon coining your own scientific reputation, would you care about, promote, and defend the research in fields so different from your own? Being successful in all that, why still look for new topics to investigate? Well, it is clear that the usual assumption of local, or contact, attractive interaction does not work here. The interaction must be global and arise from a kind of unbroken symmetry where your individual research and success is equivalent to those of others.

I wonder if we can comprehend this unusual symmetry in more exact terms. Actually, I do not care if we cannot. The point would be to accept its existence at the phenomenological level, understand the possible (and perhaps impossible) experimental consequences, and utilize the phenomenon.

The author is indebted to J. E. Mooij for numerous manifestations.

this news deservers more comment and expressiveness for me, but I have to keep it short:
Izak Snyman and me have submitted today our study on polarons suspended. You can read it here, please enjoy!

is traditionally devoted to Coulomb blockade, and marks an important change in the course, that from scattering to interacting electrons. My assesment of the lecture is rather positive, I was able to tell everything I wanted. I could speak more coherently, and give less details in one place and more in another.

The interaction with Sankore 3.1 is still not ideal. I have discovered a problem with pdf font conversion yesterday in the evening and could not solve it with usual methods, so I went to bed at 1:30 am only. I ended making images of each pdf page, arranging the images to a pdf again and using Sankore 3.1 on the result. It worked, but the image resolution is rather low, it looks ugly upon zooming.

has perfomed his Ph. D. defence on Feb. 15. He made his Ph.D. research in Grenoble, with Wiebke Guichar and Bernard Pannetier, in experimental physics of Josephson arrays. There were several important achievements in the course of his term, two are related to phase-slips in the array, that is, “my” stuff. David Haviland, Alexey Ustinov and me were foreign referees present at the defence, which was excellent(I mean, the defence).

It was fun to drop to Grenoble for a day and meet old friends. I also hope to be there in September on other occasion.

, an article with Matti Laakso and Tero Heikkila, has been accepted to Physical Review B these days. Very productive collaboration, I hope I can do more with my Finnish colleagues.