Posts in category Organization
Visit Dahlem
was another Blitzvisit to Germany, monday-tuesday this week. Dahlem is actually a borough of Greater Berlin, yet why should I care about the gigantic city if the borough is a home to a Free University and, importantly, to Dahlem Center for Complex Quantum Systems. I visited groups of Piet Brouwer and Felix von Oppen, talk to them and their students and postdocs, my former student and present collaborator Jeroen Danon.
The groups are splendid, the collaborative atmosphere and interactions are unbelivably good, if I had energy for a sabbatical I know were would I spend it. There’s quite some Mayorana and topological activity in the groups, I was surprized how fast has this fashion spreaded over the world. It was pleasantly frosty. I could not sleep half of a night thinking about an equation, like I did in my young ages. This means the visit really gave me a boost.
Less pleasant thing about the visit is that it has contributed to piling up urgent things I have to do (and hardly doing) beside the semester. Today I have attempted a break-through and tried to finish three activities from the middle of the pile: alias, none is finished.
Comprehensive Semiconductor Science and Technology
Do you believe in megabooks? Neither do I, but they exist and get published, bold attempts to encyclopediate a big chunk of knowledge in time of Wikipedia… When I was a kid, I loved to read encyclopediae but just because I came to read things that I was not indeded to read neither ever heard about. Great fascination: yet for this one has to buy a 4 thousand pages 6 volume set recently published by Elsevier. Everything you never heard of semiconductor science and technology. Here’s the link.
This sounds as an advertisment, and it is. Several years ago I wrote a contibution for this book. It took time and energy I could use elsewhere. I recognize that to find this contribution among others is not easy, and me and editors will be very likely only persons knowing about it. Nevertheless I feel kind of proud: perhaps because of that childish fascination with megabooks.
First lecture quantum transport
The semester has begun for me. Today I gave the first lecture of quantum transport course.
As usual, the number of students roughly corresponded to Blackboard list and was about the same as during all these years. The intensity of feedback was also usual, that is, almost zero during the first lecture. Let’s hope this intensifies soon.
Some things were new. The sudents were of course new, while I think I could recognize three familiar faces. The room was quite new for me, it took me like 15 minutes to gasp where the cables go, how to shift the non-digital blackboard and where to stand. The latter still waits for better solution: today I felt cornered. Also, all these novelties confused me quite a bit.
However, the most important and also most confusing novelty is the presentation program. I’ve chosen one called Sankore 3.1. It’s made with love and has some nice features like screen magnification and pulling that are absent in more sophisticated and expensive presentation programs. Yet it’s a free software, so it works only if it fancies it, the manual is in French, but this is not what makes it unreadable. Naively, I expected the screen tools to be visible for me only, and that is what I manage to do on a test projector: alias, not on the projector available in the class. I have to write on screen, and this is in principle possible: yet it requires some more training of my motorics.
One thing was both good
and relatively new: I managed to finish the lecture on time not skipping a single slide. Since the first lecture is overloaded with new and rather unusual material, this is a positive surprise. This should deteriorate the quality of explanations. However, I cannot immediately see where it went especially bad. Can you help me here? I’d appreciate your comment.
Bad things evident for me mostly concern technical side of my speech. Since I was not given lectures for more than a year, some skills have dissapeared without me noticing. The tone, strength and clearness of my voice needed improvement, I had some language difficulties, jokes and other deviations from the lecture flow could be more motivated and to the point.
We’ll see how it will go.
No pasaran?
Today me and about a thousand of other Dutch professors, this comprising a third of the whole stock, have had a rather unusual day. We put on our ceremonial gowns. We come to the Hauge and made a long procession around the Parlement and central streets. We have filled a rather big concert hall to attend a “special academic session” where high functioniers of education and research gave speeches. Afterwards we have had a fast Dutch lunch and ridden back to work.
It could have been a part of a silly bureaucratic tradition, but it was not. This manifestation was the first in Dutch history. The goal was to express our protest agains the goverment. It has proposed cuts on education and research, while setting as a goal to bring this land to top-5 knowlegde-driven economies. Well, budget cuts are usual. However, this year they are especially painful and unjust. Even the university high brass that is usually ultimately conformistic and collaborative with political elite, went amok. At least they spoke about “deceit of electorate” and cite EUR l0^{10} – 10^{11} losses the economy would suffer as the result of these cuts.
It was a demonstation of a rather unusal solidarity of the whole university community. It was also a demonstration of solidarity with the students that massed in another place in the Hauge later in that day. It went rather peacefully. However, in the end of the day there were reports of mounted police and that with dogs assulting the kids. This does not sound nice, does it.
A rather academic question is if the government will now implement the cuts in their full un-glory, saying “Pasaremos”. Can we strike a compromise or just simply strike together with our students? We’ll see.
FOM monday evening
I was in Veldhoven yesterday evening to take part in a traditional annual gathering of the leaders of our physical community. Most if not all research in physics is financed by FOM, our splendind foundation whose single goal is to investigate the Matter. This is why this is the FOM Monday evening.
The event combines socializing, reasonably good dinner, and bureaucratical games. For me, the first is a challenge, while the second and third is enteraining, so I like to go there though a trip to Veldhoven always takes more time than expected. They usually offer a good collection of cheap end wines conform to my taste. I enjoyed white wine, rather dry, almost green in taste, I enjoyed it so much that even on Tuesday morning my brain was dry and a bit green.
The main topic was the (mean) duration of Ph.D. research. An expected time of Ph.D. is 48 months in this country, at least the salaries are planned for this time period. It turns out, however, that the mean duration is 55 months. And in addition there is a long tail of the distribution to longer durations. Till recently, the FOM paid this extra salary with no question asked. Yet money is scarce nowadays. The foundation has asked us to consider the reduction of these overdues. It supplied the request with a lot of statistics meant to reveal “bad” and “good” practices in this respect.
I don’t know. I did my Ph.D. in 34 months. 48 seems me a lot. I don’t understand why a student that requires the prolongation of this term should not feel like a looser not able to prepare for examination on time. Even if he/she is such a looser, the feeling is pretty bad to start an actual carreer with. Believe me or not but none of my students did it longer than 48.
Yet a tradition is the tradition. All group leaders I saw around have displayed a polite but firm resistance to any plans to reduce the mean time, usually reffering to “risky character of scientific research”.
Unusual ideas sprinkled in the end of the evening, like giving the students (or group leaders?) cash awards for making Ph.D. on time. Very well, if this becomes true, I’d reckon it’ll be fair to ask FOM to reimburse me the prolongations I have not made thereby saving the foundation money. It’d be like a million: my personal account is ready for that.
In the end of the evening, when everybody was sufficiently tipsy, it appeared that we all are supposed to sign the Treaty of Veldhoven that requires making 90% of all Ph.D. withing 48. If I’m not mistaken, I saw Jan Zaanen signing it.
Blackboard agenda
A year ago I’ve already complained about the site that gives the schedules of university personnel including the students. In a development, they decided to supplement the site with build-in personalized agendas at the Blackboard, called MyTable. The results have followed quickly. This is what I read at the Blackboard today:
At this moment My Timetable doesn’t present all activities correctly yet. Mis-presentations can occur especially for activities scheduled over several days in a week. Much effort is put into solving this problem. From January 21, 2011 onward My Timetable will present all activities correctly.
So I will wait another week to correct my activities…
Summary 2010
Let me summarize the year: assuming nothing drastic would happen in several hours left.
It was a year full of motion and new impressions. I travelled a lot: I’ve been three times in Germany, twice in US and Russia, I got to Japan, Sweden, France, and even Belgium. I’ve met many old friends, and got new collaborators: Frans Godschalk, Dima Pikulin, Toshi Kubo. 6 papers have appeared in press. I’ve got several good scientific ideas, two of them promise a long interesting research, potentially opening new fields. I gave a lecture at my alma mater and survived Colorado highlands. From community side, Leo DiCarlo, Gary Steele, Sander Otte have joined our faculty. Andre Geim got Nobel prize. On family frontline, my eldest son Alexei graduated and has departed overseas in pursuit of Ph. D.
That was good. There were many things happening that were not really bad but were wounding my vanity. There were many things I intented to work on or accomplish but have done nothing about. My favourite research lines slowly drop out of fashion. I’ve been cited 551 times, 8% less than a year ago. None of my grant applications has been approved. There was a discussion to propose me for a big local prize: nothing came about. The list of articles that are finished but wait for write-up has not become shorter: it’s grown. I am especially unhappy about non-written research with Hongduo Wei. Nothing has been done with my personal website. Alex Savchenko and Mike Tinkham have departed from this world. On family front, the youngest son has been having all kinds of problems with his studies.
Give me, my Lord, the mood to thank you for everything from the two above lists. And perhaps, if you find it useful, the ability to learn the lessons you give to me.
Stevan Nadj-Perge
born in Kikinda, Serbia, has secured his Ph.D. title yesterday.
The promotor was Leo Kouwenhoven. The back side of the thesis showed a quantum yo-yo, an indespensible component of quantum calculations. The title of the thesis was “Single Spins in Semiconductor Nanowires”
During the event, the “dark years” have been mentioned many times: 2,5 years Stevan has spent in clean room trying to fabricate, for no avail. The sucsess has come relatively recently, and the thesis contains several important achivements, including of course the “Disentangling”, the topic we have collaborated on.
Good luck, Stevan, with futher carrier. Many remember your perfect smile that persisted even during “dark years”. I was impressed with your propositions: they were so correctly unpractical or, to formulate it better, so unpractically correct. I could sign every of them, provided I’m a bit yonger and can afford being unpractical.
Quantum Noise
and Measurement in Engineered Electronic Systems: it’s a great topic of an upcoming workshop in Max-Planck-Institut fur Physik Komplexer Systeme, Dresden. Finally good news: the institute has recently confirmed the acceptance of our application. The organizers are Wolfgang Belzig, Michel Devoret and me.
The workshop will be held in October 2012, so we have ample time to organize everything.
Visit Yale
I’m just back from United States. From Monday thru Friday I was in New Haven visiting Yale university. The program included giving two talks, meeting faculty and postdocs of Department of Physics and Department of Applied Physics, collaborating with Leonid Glazman on our longstanding project in adiabatic dymanics of superconducting junctions.
This was a very interesting visit, I will write later about it.