Condensed concepts

This week Nobel Prizes will be announced. Predicting the awardees is a fun annual exercise. It is also good to reflect on what has been achi...

 This week Nobel Prizes will be announced. I have not done predictions since 2020 . This is a fun exercise. It is also good to reflect on w...

  I am currently working on the proofs and index for Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction . It is wonderful to have got to th...

One of the most common and reliable indicators of a phase transition into a new state of matter is anomalies (e.g. discontinuities or singul...

 Twisted bilayer graphene seems to be the hottest topic in condensed matter physics right now. I tend to not follow fashion, both in clothin...

Don't follow the pack! I just read the  Random Walk to Graphene , by Andre Geim. It is the lecture he gave when receiving the 2010 ...

As I have written many times before, water is fascinating, a rich source of diverse and unusual phenomena, and an unfortunate source of spur...

Two of my UQ colleagues have a nice preprint that brings together many fascinating subjects including strong electron correlations and MOF ...

Update. 14 Jan. 2026. I just learned that the paper discussed in this post was retracted last year. "following concerns raised about th...

Some of my UQ colleagues and Jaime Merino have written a series of nice papers inspired by an organometallic molecular material Mo3S7(dmit)3...

Watching an excellent video about the invention of the transistor stimulated to me to think about other big discoveries and inventions in s...

Normally we associate spin-orbit coupling with degenerate atomic orbitals (or energy bands) associated with d- or f-orbitals. However, in so...

My collaborators and I just finished a paper Spin-orbit coupling and odd-parity superconductivity in the quasi-one-dimensional compound Li...

There is currently a lot of interest in layered materials with extremely large magnetoresistance [XMR], partly stimulated by a Nature paper ...