Posts in category Research

There’s many interesting things going around, yet I do not write anything since I have to write something I have to be completely adsorbed with. This is another attempt to get a research grant in national competition, FOM Projectruimte.

Although Majorana’s is very popular topic, few works actually address the question of their interaction. See a chance to exercise my expertise since I’ve been working with superconductivity, Coulom blockade and zero-energy states in there already 20 years ago.

has received his Ph. D. title yesterday in Materials Science Institue in Madrid, Ramon Aguado being his supervisor. The thesis of David is almost unimaginable in our time: it consists of experimental and theoretical work, and covers topics that, although all belong to quantum transport, are so various as being more suitable for a life-time cv rather than for a phd thesis bundle. Generous Spanish Ph.D. fellowships allow this in principle: a student may be finaced to stay in a research group abroad for up to 3 month every year. However, from people I know only David Marcos managed to produce a research publication during each stay.

He had to measure C12/C13 carbon nanotubes in Harvard, compute tiny shifts of flux-qubit levels in Delft, putting diamonds (theoretically) into a flux loop in Copenhagen, and get cemented by full counting statistics in Berlin, all that with sucsess. Perhaps, David, you could go a bit deeper in each of these subjects. Nevertheless you kind of give an example of broadness and overview a modern student can achieve if he/she only wants to.

It was a pleasure to meet some old friends from Madrid and elsewhere and get lunch in a hunting club frequented by King of Spain. David is a first student of Ramon Aguado: congratulations to him as well.

is a name of a conference in quantum mesoscopic physics that is held once in two-three years. The conference is distinguished in its broad scope, quality and quantity of talks, as well as location. It is held in La Thuile, at italian side of Mont Blanc. There are skiing facilities, yet I do not ski and can honestly say that my time is devoted to science (and stolen from equation since it is the semester time. However, I could not miss this conference.)

There are piles of white snow that I missed not having it enough this winter. My talk will start in about an hour. I will tell about the work with Dima Pikulin, Topological properties of superconducting junctions.

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.

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.