Cool Papers 1: General

I’ve come across a number of pretty cool papers in the past few months. Some of them deal with particular phenomena (stay tuned for possible upcoming posts on molecules at surfaces, biomimetics, phononics, crystallization, nanoparticles, wetting phenomena, computational physics, etc. etc. - at some point), and so are probably better off getting their own blog posts. Here are a few papers that didn’t fall into specific categories…

1. Frictional Anisotropy on a Quasicrystal Surface
Along with ~10 other things, a subject that I’ve recently become interested in is nanoscale mechanics, broadly defined. A key experimental tool in this field is the use of local probes to push or pull on things controllably. Miquel Salmeron’s STM group at Berkeley does work on this and related subjects, and I finally got around to reading this paper of theirs from a few years back.

The idea is conceptually very simple: while friction unsurprisingly depends on commensurability (that is, if two surfaces in contact are structurally ‘complementary’, they will ‘lock in’ to each other and hence have high friction between them - an idea that apparently dates back to da Vinci), trying to think about friction using just this notion is unrealistic. For starters, most contacting surfaces are probably incommensurate, and other factors - such as periodicity(?) - contribute, as well.

This paper nicely singles out the role of periodicity by looking at different directions along Al-Ni-Co quasicrystal surfaces using STM (to image the surface and hence distinguish the periodic and aperiodic directions of atom ordering) and AFM (to measure the probe tip-surface friction along these directions) in ultra-high vacuum. The AFM friction data can be modeled using a classical model relevant to the experimental situation (the Derjaguin-Muller-Toporov or DMT model, which I need to learn more about), enabling key parameters to be derived from the measurements.

In particular, the authors find a larger friction force (8x) along the periodic direction than along the aperiodic direction. Unsurprisingly, they ascribe this to differences in energy dissipation via electron or phonon excitation+propagation along the different directions, although it is unclear to what extent each kind of excitation plays a role. Perhaps similar local-probe measurements of a different kind (e.g. ones sensitive to electrical versus mechanical properties) might be useful… At the end of the day, I like this paper because it is an elegant example of using a unique microstructure, in which just one variable (here periodicity) changes in ways that are well understood, to study something interesting as a function of just that variable.

2. Liquid Crystals and the Origins of Life
Noel Clark gave a great talk about this work here at Penn not too long ago. I won’t write too much about this since Randy has a nice description of it over at the condmat journal club.

Here’s the executive summary: according to extensions of Onsager’s rigid-rod model for the formation of liquid crystal phases, individual molecules must be sufficiently anisotropic (i.e. the aspect ratio has to be above a certain minimum) to form a liquid crystal (LC). Surprisingly, the authors of this paper observed LC phases consisting of single-stranded (ss) DNA molecules too short to satisfy this criterion. Optical and x-ray measurements indicate that this results from end-to-end stacking of duplexes of complementary short ss-DNA molecules (known as ‘living polymerization’) into larger rods that satisfy the Onsager criterion, even at low temperatures (in concentrated phases of duplexes separated from the isotropic phase of unpaired ss-DNA molecules).

This autocatalytic behavior is like positive feedback, in a sense, and is why this work is so interesting from a biological point of view: it provides a mechanism by which the right molecules can be ’selected’ out from a ’soup’, and ‘evolve’ into larger ones as part of an RNA world. It’s an interesting idea - definitely one that’s gotten a lot of press, it seems - and while this work doesn’t provide much hard evidence for it, I’ll be interested to see what it stimulates.

3. Suprafroth!
This is a very interesting paper out recently on the arxiv, I think to be published in Nature Physics. While I don’t understand all the details, I like this particularly because it’s a nice combination of ideas from soft- and hard-condensed matter physics, like electronic liquid crystals.

The authors used magneto-optical imaging, which I need to learn more about, to image the flux pattern of superconducting lead (a type-I superconductor). Turns out that the magnetic field on the edge of a disc-shaped sample of lead is larger than the actual applied field, and for large enough magnetic field some flux can penetrate the sample. This leads to a phase intermediate between the normal and superconducting phases, possessing a froth-like magnetic structure - specifically, the froth cell boundaries are superconducting, while the interiors are normal metal. This shows up very clearly in the magneto-optical images (see figures in the paper).

The nice thing is that, unlike ‘conventional’ froths, mass-transport processes like drying or drainage are not present here (as the authors point out, “this superconducting froth involves only electrons”). This means that the froth structure can be tuned reversibly using the applied magnetic field or temperature, and the nice magneto-optical images allow for quantitative analysis of the froth structure as a function of just these parameters.

This is philosophically similar (loosely speaking) to paper #1 - the friction measurements of quasicrystals: again, it is a very nice example of using a unique microstructure (here, a froth structure that doesn’t suffer from irreversible processes, and can be controlled by magnetic field or temperature) to study something interesting (here, the structure and dynamics of froths) as a function of just the variables that you can control.

4. Universality in Conference Registration
This is a cute correspondence recently sent to Nature Physics describing an intriguing social application of statistical mechanics.

The authors used registration data from two physics conferences (# of registrants as a function of time to the deadline), saw that they matched up remarkably well (after rescaling), and came up with a simple model to capture the observed phenomenon in which the ‘pressure’ felt by potential attendees to register varies inversely with respect to the time to the deadline. Also, incorporating a Boltzmann-like factor (instead of uniform probability to register over the period of time) leads to a prediction that agrees well with # of payments as a function of time to the deadline data.

Of course, there are a number of assumptions and fitting parameters floating around here, and I’m not entirely sure this work will change the world of physics, but I always find things like this fun.

Philosophia Naturalis #8

This post was delayed by a number of ridiculous technical mishaps, but issue number eight of Philosophia Naturalis - the physics blogosphere’s very own blog carnival - is finally here. There were a number of very interesting submissions spanning pretty much everything that is involved in physics and the practice of it, and so I’ve split them up accordingly. Enjoy!

Cool Experiments
Motivated by some recent quantum optics work recording the birth and death of microwave photons in a superconducting resonant cavity by a French group, Chad Orzel has proclaimed this to be “the golden age of experimental quantum optics”. And indeed, it seems to be: two other such experiments include this study of the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss effect, and this more recent realization of the delayed-choice experiment first proposed by John Wheeler in 1978. A closely related experiment is that of the ‘quantum eraser’ proposed by Scully and Drühl in 1981, and this post does an excellent job of summarizing the general principles.

On the opposite end of the size spectrum, Cosmic Variance recently hosted a very interesting discussion on some analysis of cosmic microwave background radiation data from WMAP (NASA’s much-publicized effort to very accurately measure the temperature of the CMB).

Interesting Theory
As tends to be the case, most posts were of a more theoretical bent. The mapping of the E₈ Lie group recently received a good deal of press, including a rather vague article in the New York Times (the gist of which was something along the lines of “a bunch of mathematicians did something really complicated involving a pretty picture, and apparently it has profound implications but we’re not exactly sure what.”) Mark Chu-Carroll and John Baez have taken a different approach, recently posting about the actual math involved and the whole point of the project. And speaking of recent math-y work that has received a good deal of press, these two posts report on this paper by Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt (who used to be at Penn!) on signatures of quasicrystalline Penrose tilings in medieval Islamic architecture.

Penrose is an excellent segway into two posts by Scott Aaronson. The first poses the question: “what’s the connection between a black hole having an event horizon and its having a singularity? In other words, once you’ve clumped enough stuff together that light can’t escape, why have you also clumped enough together to create a singularity?” (This is related to the Penrose-Hawking theorems of general relativity). The second (or rather, the subsequent comments) deals with possible connections between the brain and quantum computers, something Roger Penrose has discussed in a good deal of depth. (Matt Leifer has a similar post, asking the question: “if quantum computers are more efficient than classical ones then why didn’t our brains evolve to take advantage of quantum information processing?“)

There’s more out there, too: see, for example, this post discussing the much-storied Bayesian theorem and connections to Bell’s inequalities, or this post on ‘biophysical economics’, an economic theory rooted in biological and physical realities first put forth in the 20’s. Something that struck me as being particularly interesting was this post on the use of evolutionary algorithms in lattice QCD simulations. Meanwhile, Ponder Stibbons has been plowing through Huw Price’s book (Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point) on some of the more philosophical questions of physics, with posts on Price’s objection to dynamical explanations of entropy increase (”they can never account for the asymmetry in our observations unless they themselves have asymmetric assumptions”) and a modern-day version of Olbers’ paradox.

And of course, a good deal of very interesting physics (albeit of a different sort) goes into fields of inquiry that some would consider unconventional, like geophysics. These two posts dealing with earthquakes and volcanoes touch on this to a certain extent. The latter is particularly interesting, looking into the various possible triggers for volcanoes (and drawing connections between large earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, motivated by a fictional account of Charles Darwin’s journey on The Beagle).

The Culture of Physics
Speaking of geophysics, Jennifer Oullette has written about a talk at the recent APS March Meeting on large-scale pattern formation in geological systems, citing some work by Meredith Betterton (who gave a talk here at Penn on an unrelated subject recently) on the creation of artificial spiky ice formations. (March Meeting is an event when thousands of physicists get together and tell each other about what they’re working on - held, incidentally enough, in March.) A number of people have posted about various events at March Meeting; see, for example, this other post by Jennifer Oullette, this post by Travis Hime, and this one by Doug Natelson - or see the PhysicsWeb blog.

Having huge meetings and partying like rock stars isn’t everything, though. Among other things, the physics community (just like any other) has its share of scandals, politics, marketplace tactics, things of that sort. Sabine Hossenfelder, for example, has recently blogged about the problems of treating the scientific community as a marketplace, while Julianne Dalcanton’s post on physics’ “cult of genius” definitely touched a nerve among readers. Meanwhile, Clifford Johnson has shared his views on recent events regarding an imprisoned theoretical physics grad student. (And of course, there’s the media aspect of things: John Conway recently picked up on his two previous posts on the search for the Higgs boson to blog about the unexpected media response.)

Communicating Physics
Tommaso Dorigo recently posted about some of the problems associated with the way physicists communicate things to laypeople, dealing specifically with an example from high energy physics (what is a lower limit at 95% confidence level, anyway?). At the end of the day, the physics blogosphere’s rather good with this kind of thing. For example, ‘basic concepts’ posts (like the ones mentioned in this excellent post, or this one - part of a series - on special relativity) do an excellent job. And hey, communicating physics is kind of the whole point of this blog carnival, in a sense. I think that’s where I’ll end things - hopefully it’s been interesting. Thanks to everyone who submitted either their posts or someone else’s.