Posts in category Other funny things
Nature news and views
Quite unexpectedly, I’ve published something in Nature, specifically in News ans Views:
Quantum physics: Destruction of discrete charge
Electric charge is quantized in units of the electron’s charge. An experiment explores the suppression of charge quantization caused by quantum fluctuations and supports a long-standing theory that explains this behaviour. See Letter p.58
Yuli V. Nazarov
Nature 536, 38–39 (03 August 2016) | doi:10.1038/536038a
Full text can be seen here.
Survey AQM #1
Here are the results of the first survey of AQM course. It took place on Feb 26. There were 36 participants. Main numbers are as follows:
Mark lectures: 7.4 Mark PPS: 6.7 Overall mark: 7.3
Better than last year. Still lack of PPS appreciation.
Read more
On blogging in general :)
I cannot blog on time. I cannot stop blogging at all: I have a feeling, most likely irrational , that the life passes by without a trace if I don’t do this. To balance between this, I’d like to use a rather dirty trick of back-dating. Please do not be surprised.
Keldysh formalism for multiple parallel worlds
this paper with M. Ansari has appeared on arxiv today: see it here. This is our contribution to the forthcoming Special JETP issue dedicated to 85th anniversary of Prof. L. V. Keldysh.
Abstract:
We present here a compact and self-contained review of recently developed Keldysh formalism for multiple parallel worlds. The formalism has been applied to consistent quantum evaluation of the flows of informational quantities, in particular, to evaluation of Renyi and Shannon entropy flows. We start with the formulation of standard and extended Keldysh technique in single world in a form convenient for our presentation. We explain the use of Keldysh contours encompassing multiple parallel worlds In the end, we shortly summarize the concrete results obtained with the method.
FQMT 15
Usually it is quite boring to write about the workshops and conferences, but not about this one. The long title is Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamic and it was held in Prague, 27 July – 1 August 2015. The conference, as all other conferences in series, has been organized with a good care and a warm twist. Among usual things, like meeting many old friends and attending few interesting talks, my mind was rebooted by a plenty of impressions that are best described as surrealistic, almost out-of-world. Just some highlights:
– attended a concert of (well, mostly) classical musics every evening during a week
– heard the vice-president of Czech Academy of Science complaining about unjust separation of physics and musics in the structure of his establishment
– seen Gerard t’Hooft being publicly kissed by a mid-aged lady in an eye-catching garment. She had a medal for him, you see.
– listened to the same Gerard t’Hooft talking about super-determinism in gloomy theatrical environment so the cold horror of predestination grabbed my heart
– signing my book for Marlan Scully, a legend of my student times (have never met him before)
– had a too-much-wine dinner in an establishment that looked like a benedictine monastery from one side and a country-side restaurant from another side. We had a concert in their chapel, so that was the first option for sure
I could go on with the list. Many thanks to the organizers!
Infernos
is the name of a European project I’m in. It’s about Maxwell demons. In fact, I always hesitated about the title: on my taste and beliefs, it’s not quite inspiring. However, the project so far went good.
Yet in the end of December I’ve volunteered to prepare a report for the project. In pre-Christmas mood, it seemed a task of a couple of days. Well, I finished it only today :(. I got a psychological clinch with it: could not force myself to start working and going with the work. I knew I do this wrong postponing, and this caused quite some pain – to my feeling, not quite infernal, but I’ve not been there, right? Anyway, it’s good to be through, and it’s good to avoid such clinches for all costs.
International Women’s day
for me is immediately associated with soviet time of my youth. My mom likes it very much. She’s with us now, so I brought her flowers in the morning.
Well, I’ve figure out that the day is extensively celebrated in Delft: look here. I read the long program to my mom. No, nothing inspired her. I believe there is a conceptual difference 🙂
Here and now, it’s almost exclusively a day for women about women. In soviet times, that was a day of man’s courtesy: women got gifts and flowers, both required courage and effort to bring. That made it a way more romantic 🙂 Like this: 
Exact correspondence
Me and Mohammad Ansari have submitted a paper that concludes a nice piece of research on Renyi entropies. We have found an exact relation, like fluctuation-dissipation theorem, that relates physical and unphysical quantities: you can guess the implications:))))
Exact correspondence between Renyi entropy flows and physical flows
Mohammad H. Ansari, Yuli V. Nazarov
We present a universal relation between the flow of a Renyi entropy and the full counting statistics of energy transfers. We prove the exact relation for a flow to a system in thermal equilibrium that is weakly coupled to an arbitrary time-dependent and non-equilibrium system. The exact correspondence, given by this relation, provides a simple protocol to quantify the flows of Shannon and Renyi entropies from the measurements of energy transfer statistics.
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.