As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here: This was the first time I’ve done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
Category: Experiment
Hands of Science
SteelyKid has recently begun to figure out her hands. As I noted last week, within the last couple of weeks, she’s started to be able to reliably grab things near her. Just within the last few days, she’s discovered that she has two hands, and they can interact with each other: She’s started grabbing one… Continue reading Hands of Science
Puzzling Solar Panel Press Release
Getting back to science, at least for the moment, I was puzzled by a press release from RPI, with the eye-catching headline Solar power game-changer: ‘Near perfect’ absorption of sunlight, from all angles. The article describes work published in Optics Letters (that I haven’t been able to put my hands on yet), developing new anti-reflection… Continue reading Puzzling Solar Panel Press Release
Quantum Computing Candidates: Liquid State NMR
Continuing the series of descriptions of candidate technologies for making a quantum computer (previous entries covered optical lattices and ion traps), we come to one that’s a little controversial. It’s the only remaining candidate I can describe off the top of my head without doing some more background reading, though, so I will plunge ahead… Continue reading Quantum Computing Candidates: Liquid State NMR
Quantum Computing Candidates: Optical Lattices
Last week, I wrote about ion traps as a possible quantum computing platform, which are probably the best established of the candidate technologies. This week, I’ll talk about something more speculative, but closer to my own areas of research: neutral atoms in optical lattices. This is a newer area, which pretty much starts with a… Continue reading Quantum Computing Candidates: Optical Lattices
God’s Atom
Doug Natelson is thinking about fortuitous physics, inspired by some solid state examples: Every now and then you stumble across a piece of physics, some detail about how the universe works, that is extremely lucky in some sense. For example, it’s very convenient that Si is a great semiconductor, and at the same time SiO2… Continue reading God’s Atom
Quantum Computing Candidates: Ion Traps
Some time back, I wrote about what you need to make a quantum computer. Given that it’s election season, I thought I’d revisit the topic by looking in detail at the candidate technologies for quantum computing. The first up is Ion Trap Quantum Computing, probably the most well-established of any of the candidates. The field… Continue reading Quantum Computing Candidates: Ion Traps
DonorsChoose Payoff: The Time Machine
Today, we have the first claimant of a donation incentive, from Sarah, who asks: If you could go back in time to any lab and be there as X discovery was being made, which lab/when/where would you go? I figure this could be spun a couple of ways, either to talk about some really cool… Continue reading DonorsChoose Payoff: The Time Machine
The Metastable Xenon Project
Over the past several weeks, I’ve written up ResearchBlogging posts on each of the papers I helped write in graduate school. Each paper write-up was accompanied by a “Making of” article, giving a bit more detail about how the experiments came to be, what my role in them was, and whatever funny anecdotes I can… Continue reading The Metastable Xenon Project
The Making of “Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma”
As mentioned in the previous post, the cold plasma experiment was the last of the metastable xenon papers that I’m an author on. My role in these experiments was pretty limited, as I was wrapping things up and writing my thesis when the experiments were going on. The main authors on this were Tom Killian,… Continue reading The Making of “Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma”