A few things I have learnt from professional editors

 Until a few years ago I had never engaged with or received feedback from my writing from a professional editor. This is because the only genre I wrote that involved an editor was papers for scientific journals. But the editors of journals are not really editors in the literary sense. They are more like gatekeepers. Colleagues and collaborators may provide feedback on written work, but again they are amateurs.

In the past few years, I have been writing some popular articles and a popular book and have been part of a writing group. In the process, I have engaged with several professional editors. They were getting paid to make my writing better. I have learnt a lot. Here are a few of the things. On the one hand, some of this may not seem that relevant to scientific articles and grant applications. On the other hand, think of the joy of reading a beautiful scientific article, such as those by Roald Hoffmann. Think of how many papers you try to read and you cannot figure out what they are actually about. Also, I think this is particularly relevant to writing review articles, somewhat of a lost art.

Can it be shorter? Most of the writing I have worked with editors on had a strict word limit. I struggled to stay within it. However, the editors forced/helped me in two ways. First, the fixed word limit helped me structure the work and be realistic about the volume of content. For example, for my Very Short Introduction, I broke down the 35,000-word limit to ten chapters, each of about 3500 words. This made the writing quite manageable. Second, editors helped by cutting out content that was not essential, even when I loved it. Third, editors rewrote some of my sentences making them both shorter and clearer. Seeing their improvements I became aware of some of my bad habits.

Find your voice and tell a story. We are all unique and each piece of writing is unique and is making a unique point. Don't try and be someone else. A grant application needs to make the case that your proposed project is unique and that you are uniquely qualified to do it. Your writing will be more engaging and compelling if it expresses your unique perspective and there is a natural narrative.

A few of these suggestions overlap with some of Stephen King's writing tips. 

Questions to ask about possible writing projects

When considering a writing project it is good to think about the nature and feasibility of the project. Here my focus is not on projects a typical scientist has to do such as writing a thesis or writing research papers. Rather I'm concerned with optional projects such as writing a review article, a popular book, a popular article, or a book chapter. I find the following questions helpful. The answers may be inter-related. Hence, answers to the earlier ones may need to be revised after answering the later ones.

What is my main message?

The goal is not to write a book or an article. The goal is to communicate something, something that is important and interesting.

Who is my audience?

This will really shape how you write the piece and where you try to publish it.

Am I the best person to write this piece?
In different words, who is my competition?

What is my real goal? 

To have fun? To enjoy the process? To learn something new? To become rich and famous?
To fulfill the tenure requirement of my university for "public engagement"? To get lots of citations? [Review articles are a good way to do this.] To show the general public why condensed matter physics is such a rich, exciting, and important field? To showcase my latest research results?

Clarifying your goal is necessary to answer the next question.

What is the likelihood I will achieve my goal?

Some of the goals above are much easier to achieve than others.

Besides me, who thinks that this project is a worthwhile endeavour?

Sometimes we are not very objective or realistic in our plans and aspirations. We may even delude ourselves about the importance of the proposed message, our ability to communicate it, and the likelihood of achieving our goal. Hence, an objective evaluation by more experienced colleagues and editors can save us time, pain, and disappointment.

What is the genre? What is the medium?

Is it a blog post, a piece in The Conversation, an article in Scientific American, a review article in a particular journal, or a textbook?
By the medium, I mean who will be my publisher (broadly defined)? Anyone can write a blog post. But if you want to publish a textbook you need a good publisher and contract.  For example, I am writing Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction;  it is part of a series with a well-defined genre. The medium comes with some editorial support, marketing, and distribution.

What are model examples that I can use for inspiration and for comparison?

For example, with A Very Short Introduction, I have read and looked over many other in titles in the series, on a wide range of topics: Marx, Literary Theory, Complexity, Physical Chemistry, Depression, Corruption, Elementary Particles. That's helped me find ones I like and ones I don't like. Thinking through why helps me see how I want to write mine. By the way, the best one that I have read so far is Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Do I have the time, energy, and resources to see this project to completion?

It will take longer than you think. It will be harder than you think. The larger and the more ambitious the project, the greater this will be. Co-authors may lighten the workload and also enhance the project. But, they may also complicate things. Are their potential commenters on drafts or editors?

Can I do this project in stages? Can I start small and then build up to a larger project?

For example, can I go from a series of blog posts to an article and then to a popular book? This gradual approach can make things a lot more feasible. Also, one can get useful feedback along the way, both about content and level of interest. 

All these questions reflect what is happening this week for me. I am on a writer's retreat with my friends in the "holy" scribblers eclectic writing group. Each evening we discuss projects that we're working on and give another feedback. I am mostly working on my Very Short Introduction, and other members of the group represent some of my target audience. The picture above is the view from my writing desk.=

Do you have any other suggested questions? 

Feel free to share your own experiences.

Emergent quasi-particles and gauge fields in quantum matter

Unfortunately, there is a paucity of good review articles that give gentle introductions to current research in condensed matter, both for beginning graduate students and for curious non-experts. Too many reviews are exhaustive, in both senses of the word! Contemporary Physics is a journal that aims to address this problem. I should look at it more often. In 2009, there was a nice 50th-anniversary issue, featuring some significant articles, with retrospective commentary. For example, there is a fascinating article about Snow Crystals by F.C. Franks.

My UQ colleague, Ben Powell recently submitted a nice review to the journal.

Emergent particles and gauge fields in quantum matter 

I give a pedagogical introduction to some of the many particles and gauge fields that can emerge in correlated matter. The standard model of materials is built on Landau's foundational principles: adiabatic continuity and spontaneous symmetry breaking. These ideas lead to quasiparticles that inherit their quantum numbers from fundamental particles, Nambu-Goldstone bosons, the Anderson-Higgs mechanism, and topological defects in order parameters. I then describe the modern discovery of physics beyond the standard model. Here, quantum correlations (entanglement) and topology play key roles in defining the properties of matter. This can lead to fractionalised quasiparticles that carry only a fraction of the quantum numbers that define fundamental particles. These particles can have exotic properties: for example Majorana fermions are their own antiparticles, anyons have exchange statistics that are neither bosonic nor fermionic, and magnetic monopoles do not occur in the vacuum. Gauge fields emerge naturally in the description of highly correlated matter and can lead to gauge bosons. Relationships to the standard model of particle physics are discussed.

 

A critical review of holographic claims about condensed matter

There is a very helpful review article
Demystifying the Holographic Mystique by Dmitri Khveshchenko

In order to motivate a proper full reading I just give a few choice quotes.

Thus far, however, a flurry of the traditionally detailed (hence, rarely concise) publications on the topic have generated not only a good deal of enthusiasm but some reservations as well. Indeed, the proposed ’ad hoc’ generalizations of the original string-theoretical construction involve some of its most radical alterations, whereby most of its stringent constraints would have been aban- doned in the hope of still capturing some key aspects of the underlying correspondence. This is because the target (condensed matter) systems generically tend to be neither conformally, nor Lorentz (or even translationally and/or rotationally) invariant and lack any supersymmetric (or even an ordinary) gauge symmetry with some (let alone, large) rank-N non-abelian group. 

Moreover, while sporting a truly impressive level of technical profess, the exploratory ’bottom-up’ holographic studies have not yet helped to resolve such crucially important issues as: 

• Are the conditions of a large N, (super)gauge sym- metry, Lorentz/translational/rotational invariance of the boundary (quantum) theory indeed necessary for establishing a holographic correspondence with some weakly coupled (classical) gravity in the bulk? 

• Are all the strongly correlated systems (or only a precious few) supposed to have gravity duals? 

• What are the gravity duals of the already documented NFLs? 

• Given all the differences between the typical condensed matter and string theory problems, what (other than the lack of a better alternative) justifies the adaptation ’ad verbatim’ of the original (string-theoretical) holographic ’dictionary’? 

and, most importantly: 

• If the broadly defined holographic conjecture is indeed valid, then why is it so? 

Considering that by now the field of CMT holography has grown almost a decade old, it would seem that answering such outstanding questions should have been considered more important than continuing to apply the formal holographic recipes to an ever increasing number of model geometries and then seeking some resemblance to the real world systems without a good understanding as to why it would have to be there in the first place. In contrast, the overly pragmatic ’shut up and calculate’ approach prioritizes computational tractability over phys- ical relevance, thus making it more about the method (which readily provides a plethora of answers but may struggle to specify the pertinent questions) itself, rather than the underlying physics.

Universal distributions for wealth distribution from physical ideas

I finally read most of an interesting Colloquium article in Reviews of Modern Physics
Statistical mechanics of money, wealth, and income 
Victor M. Yakovenko and J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.

[I mentioned the review 2 years ago in a post about the science of economic inequality].

It reviews the history and concept of econophysics, pointing out how some of the founders of statistical mechanics actually had a vision for its application to economics and sociology. Most of the review is about analogues with statistical mechanics that use the notion of money as a conserved quantity that is exchanged by individuals, leading to Boltzmann type distributions for wealth and income.
I found the article a nice accessible introduction to the field.

What is impressive is that the simple exponential distribution (Boltzmann) does describe empirical data over two orders of magnitude. Furthermore, the analysis gives some insight into economic inequality. This is summarised in the following sentences from the abstract and the figure below showing data from the USA.

Data analysis of the empirical distributions of wealth and income reveals a two-class distribution. The majority of the population belongs to the lower class, characterized by the exponential (“thermal”) distribution, whereas a small fraction of the population in the upper class is characterized by the power-law (“superthermal”) distribution. The lower part is very stable, stationary in time, whereas the upper part is highly dynamical and out of equilibrium.

Another result that is interesting is the income of spouses seems to be uncorrelated leading to the distribution shown below for total household income. The solid line is the simple functional form following from two uncorrelated Boltzmann distributions.

What is real scholarship?

Sometimes I bemoan the decline of scholarship in science, and in academia more broadly. About six years ago I posted about Ph.D's without scholarship, which generated a lot of comments.

This decline is reflected in a range of phenomena: hype, making hiring and promotion decisions based on metrics rather than actual scientific achievements, people writing more papers than they read, "review" articles merely listing references rather than providing critical analysis,...

But, this is all negative, it is what scholarship is not, ... what does real scholarship look like?

I think classic books give a feel for what scholarship is all about. For example, Eisenberg and Kauzmann on Water, Ashcroft and Mermin, Hewson's Kondo Problem, Coulson's Valence, and Mott's monographs. Consider the Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences.
Similarly, I am challenged by some of the monographs that some  humanities colleagues produce. (For example, Stephen Gaukroger's three volumes on science and the shaping of modernity.)
But, today I just don't see people in physics and chemistry producing books like the above.
Am I missing something?

There is certainly a subjective element. Here are a few possible ingredients to real scholarship.

1. Acknowledge the past.
Every problem, achievement, and discipline actually normally has a long history.
Even Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants.

2. Acknowledge and engage with the work of others and different points of view.

3. Acknowledge ambiguity, complexity, and controversy.

4. Comprehensive.
A wide range of topics are considered. The focus is not just narrow.

5. Synthesis and coherence.
A wide range of ideas, topics, and techniques are brought together.

6. Lucidity.

Do you think scholarship is declining?
What do you think are the key ingredients?

The problem of self citation

I recently read a couple of review articles about topics I am trying to learn about. What was really striking was how much the authors cited their own work. Indeed, in one review the majority of references were those of the author!

Sometimes it is very appropriate that authors cite their own work.  This previous work is relevant and the current work builds on the foundations of earlier work by the author. Sometimes it gives necessary background and more detail for understanding the current work.

However, there are bad reasons for authors to cite themselves.
1. It is a cynical exercise in boosting their own citation metrics.
2. They actually don't care what others are doing.
3. They don't want to acknowledge other work which contradicts or criticises their own, or at least presents an alternative picture of the problem.

Most people are concerned about 1, and this is certainly a legitimate concern, particularly as metric madness increases.
My focus is more on 3.

When I see this predominance of self-citation in an area I know little about my questions are:
- Does anyone else care about this topic and/or the authors approach?
- Is the author hiding something?

Review of nuclear quantum effects in water

Chemical Reviews just published an article

Nuclear Quantum Effects in Water and Aqueous Systems: Experiment, Theory, and Current Challenges 
Michele Ceriotti, Wei Fang, Peter G. Kusalik, Ross H. McKenzie, Angelos Michaelides, Miguel A. Morales, and Thomas E. Markland

(Trivia: 4 out of 7 authors have a surname beginning with M!)

One of the unifying themes in the review is that of competing quantum effects, illustrated above.

This article is a direct outcome of the NORDITA program, "Water - the most anomalous liquid" that I attended about 18 months ago.
Other reviews from the program will appear together in a special issue of the journal.
I must confess I was skeptical that we were going to be able to pull off these reviews, written by large teams of busy and opinionated individuals.
For ours, we are greatly in debt to Tom Markland for his perseverance and leadership.

We welcome any comments about the contents of the review.

Future challenges with nuclear quantum effects in water

Last October I enjoyed attending a meeting, Water: the most anomalous liquid at NORDITA. One of the goals of the workshop was to produce a review article, co-authored by about a dozen working groups, each covering a specific aspect of water. I was in the group on "Nuclear quantum effects in water", led by Tom Markland. I was worried that this goal was a bit too ambitious. After all, I am into modest goals! However, it is all coming together, a great credit to the organisers. Our group is now finalising our "chapter". An important and difficult task is to write something concrete and useful about future challenges and directions.

Here I give a few of my own biased tentative thoughts. Comments and suggestions would be very welcome.

Over the past decade there have been several significant advances that are relevant to understanding nuclear quantum effects in water. It was only by writing this summary that I realised just how tangible and significant these advances are. I am not sure other fields I am familiar with have experienced comparable advances.

Experiment.
Deep inelastic neutron scattering reveals the momentum distribution of protons, and can be compared to path integral simulations, as described here. Furthermore, this has illuminated competing quantum effects, as described here.

Quantum chemistry.
New accurate intermolecular potential energy surfaces and force fields, such as MB-pol.

Computational.
Path integral simulations. Besides significant increases in computational power [Moore's law] making simulation of much larger systems and better "statistics" possible, there have been significant methodological advances, such as Ring Polymer Molecular Dynamics, and PIGLET.

New concepts and organising principles.
Competing quantum effects associated with the zero-point energy of O-H stretching and bending modes. The competition is particularly subtle in water, to the point that it can change the sign of isotope effects.
Dynamical properties such as proton transport being dominated by extremely rare events, associated with short hydrogen bonds.

Simple models.
The coarse-grained monatomic Water (mW) model captures many anomalies of classical water, showing their origin is in the tetrahedral bonding. A diabatic state model captures essential features of the potential energy surface of single hydrogen bonds, particularly the variation with the distance between oxygen atoms. The model does describes competing quantum effects.

These advances present some significant opportunities and challenges.

Experiment.
Resolving the ambiguity associated with interpreting the deep inelastic neutron scattering experiments. Going from the data to robust (i.e. non-controversial) spatial probability distributions for protons, particularly ones involving proton delocalisation would be nice.

Simulation.
The path integral simulations will only be as good at the potential energy surfaces that they use. For example, recent work shows how calculated isotope effects vary significantly with the DFT functional that is used. This is because the potential energy surface, particularly with respect to the proton transfer co-ordinate, is quite sensitive to the oxygen atom separation, and to the level of quantum chemical theory. This becomes particularly important for properties that are determined by rare events [i.e. thermal and quantum fluctuations to short hydrogen bonds].

Simple models.
Monatomic Water (mW) is completely classical. It would be nice to have a quantum generalisation that can describe how the water phase diagram changes with isotope (H/D substitution). Note there is already a problem because mW is so coarse-grained that it does not contain the O-H stretch. On the other hand, mW does describe the librational modes, and these do make a significant contribution to quantum nuclear effects in water, as described here.

I welcome suggestions and comments.

The challenge of coupled electron-proton transfer

There is a nice helpful review
Biochemistry and Theory of Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer 
Agostino Migliore, Nicholas F. Polizzi, Michael J. Therien, and David N. Beratan

Here are a few of the (basic) things I got out of reading it (albeit on a long plane flight a while ago).

There are a diverse range of biomolecules where coupled electron-proton transfer plays a key role in their function. The electron transfer (ET) and proton transfer (PT) are usually spatially separated. [See blue and red arrows below].

There are fundamental questions about whether the transfer is concerted or sequential, adiabatic or non-adiabatic, and how important the protein environment (polar solvent)  is.

Often short hydrogen bonds are involved and so the nuclear degrees of freedom need to be treated quantum mechanically, in order to take into account tunnelling and/or zero-point motion.

Diabatic states are key to understanding and theoretical model development.

Although there are some "schematic" theories, they involve some debatable approximations (e.g. Fermi's golden rule), and so there is much to be done, even at the level of minimal model Hamiltonians.

Chemistry is local. In praise of Wannier.

In several posts I have emphasised that Chemistry is local.
This is illustrated by the fact that specific bonds within a molecule have approximately the same length, energy, and vibrational frequency regardless of the details of the molecule, particularly the distant parts.
This locality leads to useful concepts and theoretical approaches such as Atoms in Molecules, Natural Bond Orbitals, Valence Bond theory.
However, this locality is at variance with Molecular Orbital theory and the Kohn-Sham orbitals in Density Functional Theory (DFT); the orbitals can be completely delocalised over the whole molecule.

What are the implications for solid state physics?
Band theory is the analogue of molecular orbital theory. Bloch electronic wave functions are completely delocalised throughout the crystal.
Wannier orbitals are the physics analogue of Boys orbitals in chemistry.

In 1984 Phil Anderson wrote:

The Wannier functions are still one of the most useful but underutilized methodologies of solid state physics, and in particular it is in the language of Wannier functions that I feel the chemical implications of band theory are most effectively expressed. 

Of course the reason is that most of the concepts of chemistry are local concepts, such as bonds, ions, complexes, etc., while band theory is a global structure, in which the wave functions permeate the entire system and the eigenenergies depend on the position of every atom everywhere. There is no a priori reason why band theory should lead to such a chemically intuitive result as that the carbon—carbon single bond should have roughly the same energy and bond length whenever it appears, the Oxygen anion should have a constant radius and negative electron affinity, etc. 

This same weakness is shared by band theory’s chemical equivalent, the molecular orbital theory of Hund and Mulliken. From the very first, there was a vain attempt to restore locality by the use of atomic states and the valence-bond idea, very much advocated by Pauling, but only Pauling’s great ingenuity in applying the vague concept of “resonance” and his enormous prestige kept this scheme afloat as long as it has been: it is just not a valid way of doing quantum mechanics, and fails completely in the case of metals and of the organic chemical equivalent of metals, namely aromatic compounds and graphite, and is not very useful elsewhere except in the hands of a master empiricist such as Pauling. 

Nonetheless many local basis: how is this compatible with quantum mechanics? This is the enigma to which Wannier functions give us a very precise and clear answer. Not only that, but with a bit of ingenuity it is possible to modify the local functions in such a way as to give one a simple, accurate and serviceable method for quantum chemical calculations.

P.W. Anderson, Chemical Pseudopotentials, Physics Reports 1984

The discussion of resonating valence bond (RVB) theory is a bit harsh ("it is not just a valid way of doing quantum mechanics") and ironic given that only three years later Anderson introduced his RVB theory of superconductivity!

Indeed, the past two decades has seen a resurgence of interest in and use of Wannier functions.
Here is a recent Reviews of Modern Physics on the subject.

Review of strongly correlated superconductivity

On the arXiv, Andre-Marie Tremblay has posted a nice tutorial review Strongly correlated superconductivity. It is based on some summer school lectures and will be particularly valueable to students. I think it is particularly clearly and nicely highlights some key concepts. 

For example, the figure below highlights a fundamental difference between a Mott-Hubbard insulator and a band insulator [or semiconductor].

There is also two clear messages that should not be missed. A minority of people might disagree.

1. For both the cuprates and large classes of organic charge transfer salts the relevant effective Hamiltonians are "simple" one-band Hubbard models. They can capture the essential details of the phase diagrams, particularly the competition between superconductivity, Mott insulator, and antiferromagnetisim.

2. Cluster Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (CDMFT) captures the essential physics of these Hubbard models.

I agree completely.

Tremblay does mention some numerical studies that doubt that there is superconductivity in the Hubbard model on the anisotropic triangular lattice at half filling. My response to that criticism is here.

Possible functional role of strong hydrogen bonds in proteins

There is a nice review article Low-barrier hydrogen bonds in proteins
by M.V. Hosur, R. Chitra, Samarth Hegde, R.R. Choudhury, Amit Das, and R.V. Hosur

Most hydrogen bonds in proteins are weak, as characterised by a donor-acceptor distance larger than 2.8 Angstroms, and interaction energies of a few kcal/mol (~0.1 eV~3 k_B T). However, there are some bonds that are much shorter. In particular, Cleland proposed in 1993 that for some enzymes that there are H-bonds that are sufficiently short (R ~ 2.4-2.5 A) that the energy barrier for proton transfer from the donor to acceptor is sufficiently small that it is comparable to the zero-point energy for the donor-H stretch vibration. These are called low-barrier hydrogen bonds. This proposal remains controversial. For example, Ariel Warshel says they have no functional role.

The authors perform extensive analysis of crystal structure databases, for both proteins and small molecules, in order to identify the relative abundance of short bonds, and their location relative to the active sites of proteins. Here are a few things I found interesting.

1. For a strong bond, the zero-point motion along the bond direction will be much larger than in the perpendicular directions. This means that there should be significant anisotropy in the ellipsoid associated with the uncertainty of the hydrogen atom position determined from neutron scattering [ADP = Atomic Displacement Parameter = Debye-Waller factor]. The ellipsoid is generally spherical for normal [i.e., common and weak] H-bonds. They find that anisotropy is correlated with the presence of short bonds and with "matching pK_a's" [i.e., the donor and acceptor have similar chemical identity and proton affinity], as one would expect.

2. For 36 different protein structures they find very few LBHB's. Furthermore, in many the H-bonds identified are away from the active site. But, this may be of significance, as discussed below.

3. A LBHB may play a role in excited state proton transfer in green fluorescent protein, as described here.

4. In HIV-1 protease there is a very short H-bond with no barrier.

5. There is correlation between the location of short H-bonds and the "folding cores" of specific proteins, including HIV-1. These sites are identified through NMR, that allows one to study partially denatured [i.e. unfolded] protein conformations. This suggests short H-bonds may play a functional role in protein folding.

Mott physics with spin-orbit coupling

There is a very nice and helpful review article
Correlated quantum phenomena in the strong spin-orbit regime
William Witczak-Krempa, Gang Chen, Yong Baek Kim, Leon Balents

Just a few things I learnt from quickly skimming it.

There are many outstanding and basic questions concerning the phase diagram of even the simplest possible two-orbital Hubbard model with spin-orbit coupling. There a many possible new phases waiting to be discovered [both experimentally and theoretically] or to be shown to not actually exist because their theoretical proposal is based on uncontrolled approximations. The figure below is a possible schematic phase diagram.

Much of the interesting physics requires spin-orbit coupling energies of the order of hundreds of meV, i.e. comparable to electronic band energy scales. Hence, this is irrelevant to many materials.
But the spin-orbit coupling can be quite strong in 5d transition metals. Iridates (iridium oxides) may be model compounds to realise this physics.

Table I provides a nice summary of the properties of the plethora of different new phases that have been proposed including axion insulator, Weyl semi-metal, fractional Chern insulator, ...

Na2IrO3 was originally proposed to be a realisation of the Heisenberg-Kitaev model and thus to have a possible spin liquid ground state. However, neutron scattering shows it has an unanticipated  magnetic ground state: "a zig-zag state with four-sublattice structure." This has led to new proposals as to the relevant effective spin Hamiltonian.

The review has only limited discussion of the role of Hunds rule.

It is repeatedly stated that spin-orbit coupling leads to entanglement of spin and orbital degrees of freedom. But the exact nature of this quantum entanglement is not clearly stated or calculated. For the case of entanglement arising via Hund's rule (not spin-orbit coupling) this is nicely discussed by Oles here.

The key thing that the spin-orbital coupling/entanglement does is remove (or at reduce) the coupling of the orbital degeneracies to the lattice which normally produces the Jahn-Teller effect and orbital ordering.

Sr2IrO4  is an approximate homolog of the parent material of the high-Tc cuprates, La2CuO4. It is a Jeff = 1/2 antiferromagnetic insulator and has an exchange constant J ∼1000 K comparable to that of the cuprates. This has led to a strong push to dope the material in the search of cuprate-type physics [high-Tc superconductivity, pseudogap, strange metal]. This has not occurred yet.

Both Sr2IrO4 and Sr3Ir2O7 have illustrated the power of the rapidly evolving technique of Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering (RIXS). It seems to be particularly suited for 5d compounds, and has been used to map out the full spin wave dispersion in both compounds.

I thank Tony Wright for bringing the review to my attention.

Emergence of mistakes

The review article that Ben Powell and I just finished,
Quantum frustration in organic Mott insulators: from spin liquids to unconventional superconductors, has just appeared online in Reports on Progress in Physics.

Unfortunately, Figure 1 was incorrectly produced. [We corrected it in the proofs stage and it appears the copy editor did not follow our instructions]. The correct version is below

Review article on frustrated organics

Ben Powell and I have finished the revised  and updated version of our review article, Quantum frustration in organic Mott insulators: from spin liquids to unconventional superconductors, which we have resubmitted to Reports in Progress in Physics. We welcome any comments and hope it will stimulate more work on this fascinating subject.

New Annual Reviews journal in CMP

My subjective impression is that chemists are better at producing useful review articles, both in quality and quantity, than physicists. I particularly like Accounts in Chemical Research, Advances in Chemical Physics, Chemical Reviews, and Annual Review in Physical Chemistry. Hence, I was delighted to see that last year Annual Reviews started a new line, Annual Reviews in Condensed Matter Physics. 
The Table of Contents of the first volume looks very promising.

Do literature reviews matter?

In 1983, when I was a budding young student heading off to Princeton to do a physics Ph.D. I had the privilege of spending some time with an elderly John Edsall, an eminent Harvard biochemist, who was friend and collaborator of my father. I asked him if he had any advice for me. I expected him to say something profound and give me a long list of suggestions. He thought for a while and said, "Well I am not sure but I guess it is important to know the literature on what you are working on."
I am not sure to what extent I took on board this advice over the next decade.
But, now I think this was very good advice. The reason is knowing the literature can save you a lot of time.  If you are trying to do something someone else has already done then
-perhaps there is no point in trying it yourself
or
-you may be able to use what they have done to do something even better.

It is amazing what a discerning Google Scholar search can pick up. On the other hand, you need to be careful you don't spend all your time downloading and reading papers. Also, don't assume your supervisor knows the literature.

What value is this paper?

I finally read Conyer Herring's article Distill or Drown: the need for reviews.

It contains the figure above which is worth thinking about.

It provides a nice classification of the value of published papers.

Furthermore, it claims the distribution in value shifts with time, so that after 5 years most papers are not of significant value.

A writer of seminal reviews: Conyers Herring

Physics Today has a nice obituary for Conyers Herring, written by Phil Anderson, Ted Geballe, and Walter Harrison. Herring founded the Theoretical Physics department at Bell Labs (and presumably hired a young Phil Anderson). The obituary testifies to Herring's basic contributions to band theory (orthogonalized plane wave theory) and magnetism (exchange interactions between itinerant electrons) and to his scientific leadership and mentoring.

Herring was particularly known for the critical review articles he wrote. It is worth reading this tribute from Eugene Garfield, founder of ISI.

Forty years ago, Physics Today published Herring's article, Distill or Drown: the need for reviews. I look forward to reading it.