Time management in the academic circus

Believe it or not!
I was asked to give a talk with this title to a group of academics (a mixture of staff from universities and theological colleges). At first I thought the title a bit silly, but I eventually came around to the circus metaphor and built it into my talk. I used points such as

• Choose your ringmaster
• Choose your act
• Choose your audience
• Juggling less balls is an easier act
• Plan your act
• Many small acts can be built into a great act
• Face it! Academia is a circus!
• Tune out background noise to focus on your performance
• A circus should be fun but not drive your crazy

I will leave you to flesh out the details for yourself.

Michael Tinkham (1928-2010)

I am a bit slow on news. I just learned that Michael Tinkham died late last year. There is a nice (but short) obituary in Nature by Malcolm Beasley. Let me know if you know of other obituaries.

I really only knew Tinkham through his classic book Introduction to Superconductivity. It is interesting that when I was in graduate school (1983-1988) the book was out of print but my advisor Jim Sauls taught a whole course based on the book and arranged for us to get reprints (of mediocre quality). However, high-Tc changed all that and there is now a Dover Edition.
[His book on Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics is also hard to surpass.]

I did finally meet Tinkham at Harvard in 1996. I asked him if we could talk about organic superconductors because I was starting to get interested in them. He replied something like, "I know nothing about them. Lets talk about something else."
I don't recall whether Tinkham's comment eventually made me more or less inclined to work on organic superconductors.

I think Tinkham then told me about some recent experiments in his lab measuring electronic excitations on single nanometre sized metallic grains. [They added electrons one by one to the metallic grain and saw the effect of the "superconducting" energy gap]. Only later I appreciated how amazing these experiments were when later (by circumstance) I moved to UQ and  collaborated with some mathematical physics colleagues on papers inspired by those experiments.

Seminar on interlayer magnetoresistance

Here are the slides  for a Quantum Sciences Seminar I gave today at UQ.

Communicating the sweetness of science

Finding and doing cool science demos to impress children is not hard. However, the problem is that it is easy to fall into the trap that they become more like a magic show and communicate little about science. A grand challenge is actually performing demos that teach school children to think scientifically and critically. Framing questions and investigating possible answers for oneself is completely different from saying "gee whiz! this is so cool!" and just learning scientific names and mantras.

There is a really nice article in the Journal of Chemical Education, The Science of Chocolate: Interactive Activities on Phase Transitions, Emulsification, and Nucleation. It describes a series of demonstrations that can be done with children (and their parents). I am going to try this next week! (at a holiday kids club my church is running).

The demonstrations [described in the Supplementary material] focus on answering three questions:

• Why does chocolate usually melt in my mouth, not my hand?
• Why does chocolate feel smooth?
• Why does chocolate snap when you break it and have sheen?

The demonstrations provide a nice way to see in a memorable manner how changes in material composition change material properties.

Advancing science in Africa

Physics Today has in interesting article Raising the scientific level and networking in Africa by Tony Feder.
"Bringing top scientists to Africa has a greater impact than sending individual African scientists abroad."
It features the African School on Electronic Structure Methods and Applications (ASESMA) that was held for two weeks last year. [I am very happy my former student Elvis Shoko was able to attend]. The organisers have obtained funding to hold a similar school every two years through 2020. An excellent feature of the schools is that it is backed up by a year-round mentoring progam.
Nature Physics also had an article about ASESMA.

Aside: I only just received this January 2011 issue of Physics Today in the mail.

Facebook in the research university

First, I am not a real Facebook user. The little I know is that its uncritical and careless use can create all sorts of problems.

I think there is a significant issue here for both undergraduates and graduate students. Don't assume that what you post on Facebook is private. It is just like email. Don't write anything that you don't want to become public. Furthermore, Check and understand your Facebook privacy settings! You might be surprised what information people have access to.

You are welcome to your own private views about politics, religion, global warming, marriage, sex, the university, your advisor, ....
However, if your views are (or become) publicly available and you express your views with expletives, prejudice, in a disrespectful and uncivil manner, and an uncritical manner it may create doubt in the minds of faculty about your credibility and suitability as a (potential) scholar.

And, don't do Facebook at work!
Recently, I was receiving a tour of a world class lab and one of the grad students was busy on Facebook. He could not talk to me until he had finished what he was doing. This did not create a good impression!

On a lighter note, this clip from The Bang Theory mentions the issue.

Tailoring your talk (and abstract) to your audience

Previously I posted about the challenge of writing an effective talk abstract. Next week I am giving the Quantum Sciences Seminar at UQ. This is meant for mostly theorists working in quantum optics, BECs, quantum information, and condensed matter. Note the diverse audience. Below, I offer up for critique my abstract.
You can decide whether I was at all successful in pitching the abstract to my audience rather than just recycling one I used for a different more specialised audience. I have not prepared the talk yet. I will aim for the talk to be a less technical and specialised version of this one. Suggestions on how to do that are welcome.

Interlayer magnetoresistance as a probe of quantum coherence in layered metals

Many of the most scientifically interesting and technologically important electronic materials discovered in the past two decades have two common features:
a layered crystal structure and strong interactions between electrons.
Examples include the high-Tc cuprate superconductors and organic charge transfer salts.
Two fundamental questions about such layered metals concern the quantum coherence of interlayer charge transport and  the coherence of excited states (quasi-particles) within the layers.

I will describe the theory needed to describe the dependence of the interlayer magnetoresistance on the direction of the applied magnetic field [angle dependent magnetoresistance (ADMR)] in a wide range of materials. ADMR can be understood as a semi-classical effect or in terms of the Aharonov-Bohm effect [1].
However, there is a diverse range of strongly correlated electron materials for which
this theory fails, even on a qualitative level: the angular dependence is the opposite to
that expected from the Lorentz force law [F = q v x B].

I will discuss how ADMR is sensitive to anisotropies around an intralayer Fermi surface. Consequently, it has been used to determine anisotropies in the Fermi surface, interlayer hopping, and quasi-particle scattering rate [2,3]. On the other hand, ADMR is not very sensitive to the quantum coherence of the interlayer transport [3,4].

This talk is aimed to be at a tutorial level with an emphasis on open problems rather than a detailed technical discussion of my own recent contributions.

[1] B.K. Cooper and V.M. Yakovenko, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 037001 (2006).
[2] M. Abdel-Jawad et al., Nature Physics 2, 821 (2006).
[3] M.P. Kennett and R. H. McKenzie, Phys. Rev. B 76, 054515 (2007).
[4] P. Moses and R.H. McKenzie, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 4492 (1998).