Posts in category Organization
Josephine van Leeuwen
graduated today. She was the first master student of Leo Di Carlo in his function as prof in Delft, and of Diego Riste in his function as phd student. So all three received deserved congratulations today.
Josephine was instumental in desinging, checking and measuring 3d superconducting cavities that serve as unbelievably high-quality resonators to play qubit games with. I never saw Lorentian shapes that fit so tightly. The cavities hosted already some qubits of a record-long decay time and they promise to revolutionize the field.
Good luck to Josephine with her future. When her grandson boasts with his last acquision,a supercool quantum ipad, she may be able to recognize her desing and he may believe her.
A manifestly strong fluctuation
has occurred today: the paper with Matti Laakso and Tero Heikkillä, entitled correspondingly (see this post ), has been accepted for Physical Review Letters today, without any revisions, within a first round of the referee reports and in three weeks upon submission. I cannot recall this happenning to me before, at least not in the last 15 years.
Workshop with Keio University
On Monday and Tuesday we have had a special event: a workshop for PhD students where experimentalists and theorists from Delft come together with their colleagues from Keio University. Japanese goverment provides financial support (or, given the present state of affairs, perhaps provided) to Japanese students to attend such workshops.
Prof. Mikio Eto thus came to us bringing Takashi Kashimura and Ryota Watanabe, and Tomohiro Yokoyama was already these. Guess it was interesting for everybody since the program was really various.
Here it is for your information:
Monday
10:15-10:30 Opening: Profs. Yuli V. Nazarov (TUD) and Mikio Eto (Keio)
10:30-11:00 Takashi Kashimura (Ohashi group, Keio) “π-Josephson junction in a spin-polarized Fermi gas”
11:00-11:30 Ciprian Padurariu (TUD, Theory group)
“Superconducting spin qubits”
11:30-12:00 Peng Yan (TUD, Theory group)
“All-magnonic spin-transfer torque and domain wall propagation”
13:30-14:00 Ryota Watanabe (Ohashi group, Keio)
“Pseudogap effects on photoemission spectra in the BCS-BEC crossover regime of
atomic Fermi gases”
14:00-14:30 Vlad Pribiag (TUD, Quantum Transport group)
"The spin-orbit interaction in InAs and InSb nanowire quantum dots."
14:30-15:00 Tomohiro Yokoyama (Eto group, Keio)
“Spin-polarized current generation in quantum dot with spin-orbit interaction”
Tuesday
9:15-10:15 Prof. Mikio Eto (Keio)
“Kondo effect in quantum dot embedded in Aharonov-Bohm ring”
10:30-11:00 Mohammad Shafiel (TUD, Quantum transport group)
“Single-shot correlations and two-qubit gate of solid-state spins”
11:00-11:30 Mireia Alos Palop (TUD, Theory group)
“Adiabatic quantum pumping through surface states in 3D
topological insulators”
11:30-12:00 Dmitri Pikulin (Leiden/TUD, Theory group)
"Influence of topology on transport properties of superconducting junctions"
Ewold Verhagen
is an 31-year-old Dutch physicist with merits in optomechanics, a recently emerged brusting field exploiting the coupling of laser light and high-quality mechanical resonators. He’s visited our department today to check the opportunities.
Ewold looks yonger than he is till he starts talkinig: then you recognize he’s actually a mature scientist deeply devoted to his subject, and is ready to explain the importance of the subject for others. He’s got quite a number of prizes and awards: normally, this would corrupt a person of his age irreversibly. However, Ewold appeared to sucsessfully withstand the bait and is able to talk about with an ironic smile.
The talk was both clear and exciting. I was pleased to see a speaker who starts with Hamiltonians: he made clear that optics along with atomic/molecular physics still enjoyes an innocent harmomy between experiment and theory, a paradise long lost in the field of quantum transport. I wish him a full sucsess.
Nicolas Gisin
has continued yesterday a tradition of star talks in our Department. Prof. Gisin is a pioneer of commercial use of quantum technologies and one of selected scientists who manage to enforce his own research agenda upon the rest of the world.
Yet it remains its own research agenda, and he has clearly demonstrated this in the course of his talk. For me, the most fascinating and valueable part was the first one where he talked about device-independent Quantum Key Distribution. Two other topics seem more optics-bound.
Manifestly non-Gaussian fluctuations
in superconductor-normal metal tunnel nanostructures is a title of a new arXiv submission of me and my thrusted Finnish collaborators Matti Laakso and Tero Heikkillä. You can read it here.
In short, the paper is about making a commandable Maxwell daemon in SNS structures. Here is a detailed abstract:
We propose a mesoscopic setup which exhibits strong and manifestly non-Gaussian fluctuations of energy and temperature when suitably driven out of equilibrium. The setup consists of a normal metal island (N) coupled by tunnel junctions (I) to two superconducting leads (S), forming a SINIS structure, and is biased near the threshold voltage for quasiparticle tunneling. The fluctuations can be measured by monitoring the time-dependent electric current through the system, which makes the setup suitable for the realization of feedback schemes which allow to stabilize the temperature to the desired value.
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Elections to the Works(?)council
Guess I lived longer than my reason and got politically engaged after all. Today there are elections to the Works(?)council of our university. Not sure I translate this correctly: it is a rather artificial organ that supposed to represent the employeers at highest university level. It is requred by Dutch law. It’s first time in my TU Delft career I went so far as to vote. I voted for an only independent candidate in the list since I like hopeless enterprises in general. Besides, he’s some good points concerning transparency and languages (one quarter of TU Delft employers do not master Dutch).
Superconducting topology
rocks: our March cond-mat submission with Dima Pikulin,
Topological properties of superconducting junctions has finally made it in press. You can upload the published text here.
The publication of the article did not proceed as planned. In fact, I’m very much frustated and dissapointed with severe cases of reading disability we had to cope in course of peer review of this article in Physical Review Letters. A friend has suggested that these cases have been caused by some “non-nuanced critisism” from our side. Perhaps. Though I thought that such mechanism of pathogenesis is typical for children rather than for adults. Perhaps I had to take into account that the referees nowadays are significantly younger than me, and behave accordingly.
Seriously, I regard this article as one of the highlights of my scientific career. I’m upset with misunderstandings encountered. Fortunately, there are countries and publishing houses where real physics is still appreciated:).
Parliamentary questions
I’m rather fed up with the publication I mentioned and fuss around, yet since I’ve started the topic I have to go on.
Our MP’s read newspapers as well. To understand the read better, they’ve formulated several questions to the minister (in our time of deep saving measures, she’s not only minister of education, she also runs culture, science and public-paid television). The questions vary from innocent: have you read the article? to provocative: do you think it is fair that the university uses public budget money to pay lawsuits against the government and fines imposed on the top-brass?
I’d be interested to learn her answer.
Ondernemende universiteit in zwaar weer
is the title of the bad publication that has (yet with a week of (optionally repentant) delay-time) appeared in NRC Handelsblad last Saturday. Translated from poetic-bureaucratic Dutch, it just means “Enterprising university in trouble”(that’s our TU Delft). A muckraker obviously got hands on some old internal financial accounting reports as well as on some accounts of the confindential meetings our beloved top-brass. Very well, he’s made his job: with few playing cards in hand, he maganed to draw an astonishing and hardly attractive picture of our University. Quite expectedly, illustrated with a photograph of a fire that destroyed one of our buildings four years ago. Funny they haven’t added the portraits of students tortured in course of their initiation to student societies.
That felt pretty nostalgic to me. Chernukha, a russian word rooted in ‘black’. Though could be translated as ‘muckraking’ it surpasses the latter by scale, like ‘Black square’ of magnificient Malevich surpasses any painting ever. Chernukha is a genre of journalism that differs from libel in such a way that each statement taken apart is rather innocent and can not cause a lawsuit, while their skifull combination should make the reader depressed, remorse any possible association with organisation/subject/topic under consideration, and finally fountain-vomit. Chernukha is much stronger than libel: it’s contibuted quite a bit to the fall of Soviet state… Thus encouraged, I’ve carefully checked the text for missing articles, occurencres of double negation and traces of declensional inflections: nothing, no sign of my wonderful mothertong, the author must be close to native Dutch.
What surprised me beyond any measure is an overwhelmingly excessive, almost hillarious reaction of our beloved top-brass. The warning about the publication was issued a week in advance. Precisely an hour before the newspaper get to subscribers one can read on the web-site of our university a point-by-point rebuttal of the article (encompassing at least a half of the points, good score!). Next day the rebuttal has been translated in English: to reach those who had no chance to comprehend the Dutch-language article. This is given by the fact that the article in question was not available freely on internet (now it is here, thanks to an anonymous road engineer). In fact, the article was reliably buried in the forty-pages saturday edition. I read it by my friends who subscribe. It took us 5 minutes to find the article in this paper heap. From this, I would estimate the potential audience by 100 persons. The relentless efforts of the top-brass have probably brough the audience to ten thousand. Wonder if in addition to the sins listed somebody has also a secret share in Handelsblad distribution…