One thing I left out of the making-of story about the squeezed state BEC paper last week happened a while after publication– a few months to a year later. I don’t quite recall when it was– I vaguely think I was still at Yale, but I could be misremembering. It’s kind of amusing, in an… Continue reading The Making of a Sign Error
Category: MXP
The Making of “Squeezed States in a Bose-Einstein Condensate”
Yesterday’s write-up of my Science paper ended with a vague promise to deal some inside information about the experiment. So, here are some anecdotes that you would need to have been at Yale in 1999-2000 to pick up. We’ll stick with the Q&A format for this, because why not? Why don’t we start with some… Continue reading The Making of “Squeezed States in a Bose-Einstein Condensate”
My Claim to Scientific Fame: “Squeezed States in a Bose-Einstein Condensate”
In Monday’s post on squeezed states, I mentioned that I really liked the question because I had done work on the subject. This is, in fact, my claim to scientific fame (well, before the talking-to-the-dog thing, anyway)– I’m the first author on a Science paper with more than 500 citations having to do with squeezed… Continue reading My Claim to Scientific Fame: “Squeezed States in a Bose-Einstein Condensate”
The “Ballistic” Story
Last week, in the post about fermion conduction, I left a reference hanging: There’s nothing physically blocking the atoms from flying right through the channel– in fact, an atom that enters the channel will always exit the other side without slowing down along the way. This is termed “ballistic,” a term that will always have… Continue reading The “Ballistic” Story
Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts
Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to “unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text.” Like Bee, I couldn’t resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I… Continue reading Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts
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”
Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma
This is the last of the papers I was an author on while I was in grad school, and in some ways, it’s the coolest. It’s rare that you get to be one of the first people to do an entirely new class of experiment, but that’s what this was. It kicked off a new… Continue reading Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma
“Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”
This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it’s not the last xenon paper I’m an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process. My favorite story about this stuff was… Continue reading “Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”
Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions
This is the last of the five papers that were part of my Ph.D. thesis, and at ten journal pages in length, it’s the longest thing I wrote. It was also the longest-running experiment of any of the things I did, with the data being taken over a period of about three years, between and… Continue reading Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions