Wolfson Summer Ball

Having enjoyed the tempered excesses of Darwin’s May Ball (link), this week end hails Wolfson’s Summer Ball.

Tickets are still available, and, while I’m sure it’s not going to be as fabulous as the Christmas Ball, it should still be a night of regal festivities.

Check out the website for more details (link).
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Europe? It’s like joining a golf club

‘…It is curious that you should have brought up this subject, [said the Oldest Member] for only a moment before you came in I was thinking…But perhaps I’d better tell you the whole story from the beginning.’

No doubt the Oldest Member, of The Clicking of Cuthbert-fame, would be amused at all this recent talk of the importance of golf clubs, their members, and their oh-so-important rules.

The Telegraph’s Commons Sketch has an amusing play on this political episode (link).
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Probing hidden dimensions…using condensed matter?

Attended at talk last Thursday (27 May) by Prof. Alexander Andreev, the discoverer of Andreev Scattering and an eminent low-temperature physicist who is currently Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In what appeared to be (and, in fact, was) a hurriedly-prepared talk, he struggled to keep the attention and interest of both the physicists and chemists present (it was a joint seminar). It is always extremely difficult tailoring a presentation to such a mixed audience, and his historical approach to the subject matter of low-temperature physics was well-judged, but — even with my very limited grasp of the background — I did find it a little repetitive and, dare I say it, elementary, as he didn’t really take the opportunity to really engage with the more recent advances.

Still, and perhaps this is how these talks go, he did build up some interesting ideas in the final few minutes. He addressed a gedanken experiment measuring the electrical properties of a four-point contacted nanoparticle and argued that such measurements could reveal the movement along theta, one of the dimensions introduced in high-temperature field theories. This experiment, assuming that the nanoparticle contained some hundred million (10^8) atoms, would need to be conducted at 0.1mK; too low to be obtained presently, but probably within our reach in the next decade.

Will us condensed-matter bods be able to beat our high-temperature buddies in a race to probe higher dimensions? Will such romantic ideas engage the public/government sufficiently to see CMP receive piles of cash similar to those to the funding black-holes of particle and plasma physics? Only our motion along the fourth dimension will tell….
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AFM et al.

Currently investigating developments to the basic ideas of AFM to learn more about the interesting samples I’ve managed to prepare.

The NPL (link) have a good overview of the basic principles of AFM (link).

Capacitance-AFM is one way of mapping sub-surface electron density. But I’m more interested in Conductance-AFM (also rather confusingly sometimes referred to as C-AFM). I’ve found a good overview here [pdf].
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