Condensed concepts

Tony Leggett died last week. The New York Times has a nice obituary. One measure of his influence on me is that more than 20 posts on this ...

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis received the prize  “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling an...

Two years ago, I wrote a post about a paper by Wei et al,  Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models Then last year, I posted about a pap...

Time has a direction. Microscopic equations of motion in classical and quantum mechanics have time-reversible symmetry. But this symmetry is...

An important question about emergent properties is whether they can be explained solely in terms of the properties of the components of the ...

What is condensed matter physics about?  In his beautiful book, The Problems of Physics (originally published in 1987), Leggett has a nice ...

For the marketing plan for my Very Short Introduction , I was recently asked whether there were any significant anniversaries happening in c...

 There are two aspects to this question concerning the future of condensed matter physics. First, are there big things to be discovered? If ...

Reflecting on macroscopic quantum effects in condensed matter I have come to the view that Brian Josephson is a key figure. But, the observ...

A helpful starting point for me when considering universities after the pandemic is the cover story of The Economist , from two weeks ago, ...

Mean- field theory (self-consistent field theory) is incredibly valuable. It  gives significant insights into what is possible with a partic...

Yesterday, Matthew Woolley gave an interesting Quantum science seminar at UQ about some of his recent work on Photon assisted tunnelling wi...

An interesting question is: to what extent does the local institutional environment and the status of an institution affect the quality of t...

Two weeks ago I went to an interesting history seminar  by Dalia Nassar that considered a debate between the philosopher Immanuel Kant and...

Previously, I asked the question : are there any condensed phase systems in chemistry where quantum effects [e.g. tunneling, interference, e...

Chapter 3 of Hewson's The Kondo Problem to Heavy fermions reviews Anderson's poor man's scaling treatment of the Kondo model. ...

Much of condensed matter physics is concerned with finding the relevant order parameter for new phases of matter. Indeed this is a good way ...

Last week I gave half a lecture  on the phase diagram of helium and superfluidity to a second year undergraduate class on Thermodynamics an...

This attempts to answer questions raised in a previous post. Here is one point of view. Tunneling is always present and as one lowers the ...

I just re-read most of Tony Leggett's review article, Testing the limits of quantum mechanics: motivation, state of play, prospects.  He...