nanoscale views

slow blogging + pnictide fun

2008-07-06T13:46:00.002-05:00

I'll be traveling (work + vacation), so blogging will be slow until July 15 or so.

Before I go, I wanted to point out that the plot continues to thicken regarding the pairing symmetry of the new iron pnictide superconductors. For example, this paper reports scanning SQUID microscopy on a sample of one of the compounds, with no apparent evidence for sign flips in the order parameter that you might expect if the material was, e.g., d-wave like the cuprates. In contrast, this paper argues that scanning tunneling spectroscopy data resemble d-wave expectations. This paper reports photoemission studies showing that the compounds have quite a complicated band structure and suggests that different parts of the Fermi surface may have different phenomenology. That sounds reminiscent of this theory paper, but I haven't read them in detail.

What makes an experiment "good"

2008-07-01T20:17:00.003-05:00

Recently I've had some conversations with a couple of people, including someone involved in journalism, about what makes a physics experiment good. I've been trying to think of a good way to explain my views on this; I think it's important, particularly since the lay public (and many journalists) don't have the background to judge realistically for themselves the difference between good and bad scientific results.

There are different kinds of experiments, of course, each with its own special requirements. I'll limit myself to condensed matter/AMO sorts of work, rather than high energy or nuclear. Astro is a whole separate issue, where one is often an observer rather than an experimenter, per se. In the world of precision measurement, it's absolutely critical to understand all sources of error, since the whole point of such experiments is to establish new limits of precision (like the g factor of the electron, which serves as an exquisite test of quantum electrodynamics) or bounds on quantities (like the electric dipole moment of the electron, which is darned close to zero as far as anyone can tell, and if it was nonzero there would be some major implications). Less stringent but still important is the broad class of experiments where some property is measured and compared quantitatively with theoretical expectations, either to demonstrate a realization of a prediction or, conversely, to show that a theoretical explanation now exists that is consistent with some phenomenon. A third kind of experiment is more phenomenological - demonstrating some new effect and placing bounds on it, showing the trends (how the phenomenon depends on controllable parameters), and advancing a hypothesis of explanation. This last type of situation is moderately common in nanoscale science.

One major hallmark of a good experiment is reproducibility. In the nano world this can be challenging, since there are times when measured properties can depend critically on parameters over which we have no direct control (e.g., the precise configuration of atoms at some surface). Still, in macroscopic systems at the least, one should reasonably expect that the same experiment with identical sample preparation run multiple times should give the same quantitative results. If it doesn't, that means (a) you don't actually have control of all the parameters that are important, and (b) it will be very difficult to figure out what's going on. If someone is reporting a surprising finding, how often is it seen? How readily is it reproduced, especially by independent researchers? This is an essential component of good work.

Likewise, clarity of design is nice. How are different parameters in the experiment inferred? Is the procedure to find those values robust? Are there built-in crosschecks that one can do to ensure that the measurements and related calculations make sense? Can the important independent variables be tweaked without affecting each other? Are the measurements really providing information that is useful?

Good analysis is also critical. Are there hidden assumptions? Are quantities normalized in sensible ways? Do trends make sense? Are the data plotted in ways that are fair? In essence, are apples being compared to apples? Are the conclusions consistent with the data, or truly implied by the data?

I know that some of this sounds vague. Anyone more eloquent than me want to try to articulate this more clearly?

New comic

2008-06-23T12:56:00.002-05:00

Thanks to Tom for having a link on his page to this. Too true! This is also brilliant. Good to have a laugh, despite the passing of George Carlin. One of my favorite Carlin quotes: [W]e have flamethrowers. And what this indicates to me, it means that at some point, some person said to himself, "Gee, I sure would like to set those people on fire over there. But I'm way too far away to get the job done. If only I had something that would throw flame on them."

No "Singularity" for you.

2008-06-23T08:41:00.003-05:00

I wasn't going to even mention the idea of a Singularity, but then the IEEE made a point of dedicating an issue of their magazine to the concept. For those who don't know, the term "Singularity" originates with sci-fi author Vernor Vinge, who has written some compelling novels. Proponents of the concept believe that we live in an era of exponentially accelerating technological change, and that at some point (the Singularity) there will be a complete break in the nature of our species and societies, ushering in what some call a transhumanist future. The technologies typically associated with this idea are (1) Drexlerian molecular nanotechnology, so that we can eliminate scarcity by building anything we want anytime we want via (self-reproducing) nanomachines; (2) immortality via nanotechnological or biochemical control over biological processes that lead to senescence; and (3) strong AI, often including the concept of people uploading their minds to constructed hardware. The thing that continues to surprise me about this idea is that so many people seem to take it so seriously.

Hey, I'm all for optimism, and I'm generally bullish on the future of the species despite current scariness and some scientific arguments, but asserting that we will have a transhumanist utopia in twenty or thirty years is a wee bit of a reach, to put it mildly.

New physics building - suggestions? ideas? horror stories?

2008-06-20T20:08:00.003-05:00

My university is in the design phase on a new physics building. This is exciting - first, it's a rare opportunity to design new lab space literally from the ground up. Second, new space will make possible some targeted expansion in the experimental directions in our department as well as in the experimental physicsy part of our electrical and computer engineering department.

Anyone out there have suggestions on building design, particularly with regards to laboratory facilities, utilities, HVAC, electrical service, vibrations, etc.? We're already looking at several recently constructed buildings elsewhere to learn lessons about best practices. If you have thoughts on physics buildings that you think are particularly well done (e.g., the electrical wiring system for the labs at the new nano building at Purdue looks extremely clever and well done), or, conversely, specific examples of design ideas that are lousy in practice or implementation, please post in the comments or email me.

Great scientific workshop

2008-06-12T14:59:00.002-05:00

Posting from the scenic Newark International Airport.... I just finished attending the 2008 international workshop, ESPMI-08 - Electronic Structure and Processes at Molecular-based Interfaces, at Princeton University, hosted by Antoine Kahn and David Cahen. For me, this was practically the perfect scientific meeting - about 80 attendees, a mix of theorists and experimentalists, and all the talks were very good and pitched at the right level. I'll write more about this later, but for now, two highlights that show that some things are truly universal.

First, we were having a group discussion about organic photovoltaics and the relevant issues, and it was refreshing to see that everyone, even people who have been thinking about these problems for twenty years, starts out thinking about semiconductor interfaces by drawing the un-coupled materials and then thinking about what happens when they are brought into contact. I know I think this way, but it's reassuring to see that no one can just draw complicated band alignment diagrams freehand.

Second, during this morning's session there was a 1-second brownout/power glitch - the air conditioning shut down and restarted; the computer at the front of the lecture hall rebooted. The part that struck me as amusing was how the Princeton faculty immediately motioned to their grad students/postdocs to run off, or ran off themselves, to check on the lab equipment (particularly the UHV systems). I can totally see myself doing that.

Simple numbers

2008-06-06T16:12:00.003-05:00

So, if crude oil futures cost at least $126/42 gallon barrel these days, doesn't that imply that the raw starting material for gasoline already costs (once you factor in the time delay between futures contracts and refining) $3/gallon? This suggests to me that the "correct" price for gasoline in the US should be closer to $5-6/gallon, when the refining catches up with futures. (That doesn't even touch on issues about how much of the crude oil pricing is due to speculation vs. actual supply & demand, or how much of this is due to the effective weak dollar policies of the US central bank.)

Plagiarism at the professional level

2008-06-04T20:26:00.002-05:00

Remember my discussion of plagiarism? Remember how a couple of readers didn't seem to thing that this was necessarily that big a deal, particularly if it was "just" background stuff and not actual data? Well, I'd be curious to know what they think of this case. I hope that someone follows through and notifies the editors at the respective journals. Makes you curious about their other publications, doesn't it?

This week in the arxiv: superconductivity update

2008-06-04T17:01:00.004-05:00

Summer writing and travel are eating my blogging time a bit, and I've also agreed to write the occasional nano-related blurb for the ACS. While my posting rate has taken a hit, science has continued to march forward, with a lot of exciting new preprints concerning (relatively) high temperature superconductivity. Here's a sampling....

arxiv:0805.4463 - Matsumoto et al., Superconductivity in undoped T' cuprates with T_c over 30 K
This paper is a perfect example of why materials growers are (unfortunately often unsung) heroes in this field. The authors have come up with a new method for growing cuprate compounds of the form T'Re₂CuO₄, where T'Re is a rare earth from the series (Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Gd). Historically these compounds were found to be antiferromagnetic insulators - no superconductivity. In this new work the authors argue that these old results were due to interstitial oxygen leading to pair-breaking. Instead, with the new growth + annealing technique, these compounds are found to exhibit superconductivity with transition temperatures as high as 30 K. These subtleties are why one should always be very careful when looking at suggested compositions in new compounds....

arxiv:0805.4630 - Rotter et al., Superconductivity at 38 K in the iron arsenide (Ba_1-xK_x)Fe₂As₂
This is the first paper I've seen (though I may have missed one) that reports superconductivity in a compound related to the new iron arsenide systems but with two iron arsenide layers per unit cell rather than one. Back in the heyday of the cuprates, the same sort of thing happened - people went from compounds with single copper oxide planes to those with multiple planes per unit cell, and transition temperatures went up. Once again we see how rich the materials landscape can be. Update: as anon. in the comments pointed out, this isn't actually the 2-layer version of the compound. Rather, it's analogous to the so-called "infinite layer" version. My mistake.

arxiv:0806.0063 - Wang et al., Very high critical field and superior J_c-field performance in NdO_0.82F_0.18FeAs with T_c of 51 K
Other exciting features of the new iron arsenide superconductors are their extremely high critical fields and critical currents. If the transition temperatures could be raised a bit (say past 77 K) and the compounds could be made in wire form (certainly not easy in the cuprates; unlikely to be simple in these either since like the cuprates they are brittle), this could be a huge deal for high field magnets and other applications of superconductivity.

arxiv:0805.4616 - Chen et al., The BCS-like gap in superconductor SmFeAsO_0.85F_0.15
arxiv:0806.0249 - Matano et al., Spin-singlet superconductivity with multiple gaps in PrO_0.89F_0.11FeAs
These two papers examine two related compounds with different techniques, trying to figure out how the charge carriers in these iron arsenides pair up to form the Cooper pairs that make up the superconducting condensate state. In the former, measurements of Andreev reflection (a process where an electron in a normal metal approaches a superconductor, two electrons actually cross into the superconductor, and a hole is "retroreflected" back into the normal metal, leading to a pronounced feature in the conductance of the metal/superconductor interface) strongly suggest that the samarium compound acts like an ordinary BCS superconductor. That is, each Cooper pair has zero angular momentum (s-wave pairing); this implies that the superconducting gap is uniform in momentum space, with no nodes. In contrast, the cuprates exhibit d-wave pairing, with a superconducting gap that has a four-lobe structure in momentum space and that goes to zero along four particular crystallographic directions.

The second paper uses NMR measurements of the Pr compound to argue instead that there are multiple gaps, and further that the pairing symmetry is p-wave (which has been seen in superfluid ³He and in strontium ruthenate). At first glance, these two results seem to disagree, though (a) they are talking about different materials, and (b) the Andreev measurements are particularly sensitive to the surface, while the NMR measurements are nontrivial to interpret, at least for nonexperts. Well, this is the fun part - stay tuned, and we'll see how this shakes out.

Cold fusion - same old same old.

2008-05-26T13:38:00.004-05:00

Once again (and it seems like this happens every couple of years) someone is claiming "success" in a cold fusion experiment. Basically this fellow has made a cell containing some composite of ZrO2 and nanoscale Pd crystals. The claim is that when this cell is filled to moderate pressures (a few bar) with deuterium gas over a couple of days, the cell gets hot (compared to its surroundings) and stays hot for a while (tens of hours), and that ⁴He is detected afterward. Furthermore, the claim is that control experiments with ordinary hydrogen do not produce the long-term heating or helium, and that control experiments without the Pd/ZrO₂ produce no heating at all. People who know next to nothing about nuclear physics argue that the lack of neutrons (from the D+D goes to ³He + n reaction pathway) or gamma rays is fine, since simple p and n counting lets you have D + D goes to ⁴He, despite the fact that the ³He reaction is vastly more favored in ordinary fusion. There continues to be no credible mechanism for getting the D nuclei close enough to each other to get fusion. Now, it's entirely possible that there is weird chemistry going on here, but how come in twenty years of people trying to do this stuff there has yet to be a clean, well-designed experiment done by physicists that is reproducible and actually shows anything interesting? It's grating on many levels that this, an anecdotal discussion of nonconclusive experiments, gets touted online through slashdot, gizmodo, digg, engadget, etc. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

This week in the arxiv

2008-05-25T12:49:00.002-05:00

Two papers from the past week that caught my eye....

arxiv:0805.3309 - Bunch et al., Impermeable atomic membranes from graphene sheets
This is a nice piece of work from Cornell combining the techniques from three research groups to look at the permeability of single-layer graphene sheets. The authors prepare freely suspended graphene trampolines and apply controlled pressure differences across them. They use scanned probe methods to measure the membrane shape, which ends up being well described by elasticity theory assuming that the elastic modulus for the graphene sheet is about 10¹² Pa (that's big but not unexpected). By watching that shape as a function of time, they can tell how long it takes the pressure inside the chamber (sealed off by the graphene) to equilibrate with the outside environment. Elegant.

arxiv:0805.2414 - Finck et al., Area dependence of interlayer tunneling in strongly correlated bilayer 2d systems at nu(total)=1.
I've written before about two-dimensional electronic systems (2des), and how they are very useful for looking at all sorts of rich physics such as the fractional quantum Hall effect. This experiment looks at a variation on this theme. For a while now it's been possible to make two high quality 2des separated by a thin barrier - thin enough that the charges in one layer can feel the charges in the other layer via the Coulomb interaction. Since like charges repel, if the two layers have the same density of electrons, a favored low energy state would have every electron in the upper layer accompanied by a hole (the absence of an electron) in the lower layer. If the barrier is sufficiently thin, tunneling can take place between the two layers. One fascinating observation has been that this interlayer tunneling, under certain circumstances, can look very much like the kind of Josephson tunneling that one gets between superconductors. One nagging question out there has been whether the very sharp tunneling seen is a bulk effect (and taking place over the whole area where the two layers are tuned to each other) or something else (e.g., an edge effect, like many quantum Hall phenomena). This experiment shows that the tunneling really is proportional to the area, and thus is a bulk effect. This is a tough experiment, requiring great samples, demanding fabrication, and very sensitive measurements at low temperatures.

Public service announcement re: cheating

2008-05-19T11:48:00.002-05:00

I want to alert faculty colleagues to a website of which they need to be aware if they teach, particularly undergraduates. I won't link to them since I don't want to drive up their revenue, but it's called cramster.com, and while they bill themselves as a "24/7 study community", what they do is provide links to scanned solution manuals for many many textbooks. What this means is, if you teach a course from a reasonably popular book, you need to be aware that students can and often do buy the homework solutions online. As far as physics goes, they have a rather eclectic assortment. Lots of intro books, and a few major upper level ones (Griffiths; Goldstein; Jackson). If you make up a final exam using problems from the textbook, you're opening yourself up to this problem. If your problem sets contribute a lot to the final grade in a course and you use verbatim problems from the book, again you are almost certainly going to see this on some level. The more you know....

Now that would speed up sample fabrication.

2008-05-15T11:08:00.002-05:00

There's no question that one of these would be useful to have in the lab. Check out the whole catalog of their products - fun for all ages.

This week in the arxiv

2008-05-13T21:29:00.002-05:00

A couple of interesting papers, two about graphene and one about a weird fluid mechanics effect.

arxiv:0805.1830 - Bolotin et al., Temperature dependent transport in suspended graphene
It's become clear over the last year that a lot of what was limiting the measured electrical transport properties of graphene sheets had to do with interactions between the graphene and the underlying substrate (usually SiO₂). Now multiple groups have started preparing suspended graphene membranes (supported around the edges by oxide) overhanging underlying gate electrodes. By ramping up the current through the suspended membrane, the graphene sheet can be resistively heated in vacuum up to a temperature sufficient to desorb residual contaminants, and electronic properties can be measured without substrate effects. In this paper the Columbia group demonstrates that extremely high mobilities are then possible (well over 100000 cm²/Vs), and by examining the temperature and gate dependence of the conduction they can understand the scattering mechanisms at work as well as residual disorder in the system. Very clean looking data.

arxiv:0805.1884 - Booth et al., Macroscopic graphene membranes and their extraordinary stiffness
The Manchester group has also been very busy. In this paper they show a cute technique to produce large (say 0.1mm in diameter) graphene sheets in a form that's easy to suspend and handle. Basically instead of abrading or cleaving graphite into graphene on top of oxidized Si, they do so on top of Si coated with a layer of e-beam resist. An additional layer of a different sensitivity resist is put on top and patterned, followed by metal deposition. The metal layer forms a frame that goes around the previously identified graphene sheet, and the metal is then used as a seed layer to deposit a more robust Cu layer via electrochemistry. Finally, the original resist layer is dissolved, freeing the graphene+Cu frame for manipulation. They then further study the mechanical properties of these suspended layers, finding that single sheets of graphene are indeed very stiff - much more so than you might think, since they're 1 atom thick. The technique is elegant, and there is one particularly impressive TEM image. Nice SuperSTEM that they have over there in Cheshire.

arxiv:0805.0490 - Amjadi et al., A liquid film motor
Hat tip to arxivblog for pointing this out to me. These folks at Sharif University in Iran have found that DC electric fields can make soap films flow in very interesting and controllable ways. They suggest a few possible mechanisms for this kind of electrohydrodynamic motion, but conclude that none of them are entirely satisfactory. The paper has a minor rendering problem with Fig. 4, but you should definitely watch the movies on their webpage. Very dramatic! Soft CM physics can be inspiring - here's a visually impressive phenomenon that might actually be useful in fluidic applications, and the whole experiment is simple, elegant, and inexpensive. No exotic apparatus required.

The fun parts

2008-05-10T22:18:00.002-05:00

In contrast to the previous post, there have been some fun parts of the job lately. Today was commencement, which is always amusing - I get to play dress-up and look like a real academic. If only point 4 in this list was true, then commencement would be much more exciting.

In the lab we've had some genuinely weird data come along, and that can be fun, too. In one kind of structure we're observing a phenomenon that is completely reproducible but for which we have essentially no sensible explanation. We've been messing around with this for a month, and every time we come up with a plan, thinking we know what's going on, nature turns around and proves us wrong. Whatever is going on, it seems interesting. When we figure it out enough to write it up, I'll discuss it further here.

Lastly, after a trip to the movies last week I had the shocking realization that Rice is now partnering with Stark Industries. Sweet. I need to get one of those flying suits.

Copying text without attribution is plagiarism.

2008-04-29T20:49:00.002-05:00

Amazingly, there are graduate-level students out there who do not understand this simple, basic fact. When you're writing a scholastic or scientific document, you never copy other people's words - certainly not complete verbatim sentences - without clear attribution and indication that you're quoting someone else. You just don't. Ever. Doing so is plagiarism, and as any kind of professional you should know that it's wrong. Amazingly, some students don't seem to get this point, even when they've been told about this, explicitly, repeatedly, and actually signed documents attesting that they understand this, and when they know that the professor can use this amazing tool called google to figure this sort of thing out.

Just. Don't. Do. It.

Come on, AAAS

2008-04-25T20:38:00.002-05:00

I'm a member of the AAAS, in part because I support their various efforts, and in part because I like my subscription to Science. However, at least three times a year, I get junk mail at my house or at my departmental address, asking me if I'd like to join AAAS for the low new-member rate of $99/yr. How can these geniuses not realize that I'm already a member? I have an unusual last name, and they already have both my work and home addresses on file. Can't they tell that Prof. Douglas Natelson and Mr. Douglas Natelson with identical addresses are the same person? They must waste hundreds of dollars in postage and thousands of pieces of paper doing this, since I'm sure I'm not the only one getting these useless mailings. Good grief, folks, just do a sensible search on your mailing database for duplicates.

AMO physics coolness

2008-04-24T08:50:00.003-05:00

I saw two things in Science this week that I found quite interesting. First was a mention in Editor's Choice of this paper from my old stomping grounds at Stanford. The arxiv version is here. The idea is another great example of using essentially table-top physics (if you have a large, stainless steel vacuum chamber and lasers on your table) to test the limits of the Standard Model of particle physics, usually the domain of the high energy folks. Here's the story: there are many weird alternatives to the standard model where things like charge quantization (the idea that charge comes in chunks of exactly -e for electrons, and +e for protons, for example) and charge neutrality are approximate rather than exact, due to the breaking of some far out symmetries at very high energy scales. This paper points out that this idea can be tested very precisely (to 1 part in 10²⁸) using interferometry of Bose-condensed atoms. In an optical interferometer, light (consider only one particular color) is split into two beams that take different paths, and then recombined. As light travels on each path, you can figure out how much phase the light waves accumulate by dividing the pathlength by the wavelength (and multiplying by 2 pi if you want your phase to be in radians). The intensity when the beams are recombined is proportional to the cos of the phase difference between the paths. This can be an incredibly precise way of measuring relative path lengths, and is essential to lots of modern technology. In the proposed experiment, the Bose-condensed atoms act like matter waves, and the idea is to do the same thing. However, in quantum mechanics the phase difference that builds up is related not just to the path length, but also picks up a contribution due to the (integrated) difference in (potential) energy (times time, divided by hbar) between the two paths. This is the way AMO and neutron interferometry measurements of gravity work: send waves along paths at different heights and recombine them, and the phase difference will include a contribution proportional to (m g h) where m is the mass of the particles, g is the gravitational acceleration, and h is the height difference. In the proposed experiment the atom waves are sent through regions of different electrostatic potential (voltage). If the atoms aren't exactly neutral, the voltage will couple to their charge and lead to a phase difference that would otherwise be absent. It's very elegant, and may be a way to test advanced high energy ideas without TeV particle accelerators.

The second bit that I read was this article about the race to use cold fermionic atoms trapped in optical lattices as a means of implementing condensed matter models of interesting systems (e.g., the Hubbard model of high-T_c superconductors). The theoretical models are computationally nightmarish to solve exactly, in large part because of the Fermi-Dirac statistics problem that the correct many-body wavefunctions must pick up a minus sign if the positions of any two electrons are swapped. The plan is to implement what are basically analog computers - cold atom systems that can be poked, prodded, and tuned - to map out the solutions. Using tunable model systems to explore strong correlations in quantum matter also happens to be the focus of Rice's Keck Program in Quantum Materials. (One note for regular commenter Sylow: now do you believe me that there is a DARPA program on this?)

Career comments

2008-04-20T21:20:00.002-05:00

Well, it's that time of the year again. Lots of blogging (here , here, here, here) about advice to tenure-track faculty (and other interested parties) about the tenure process. I've decided to dust off a post I originally made last May, with a few revisions and additions, to contribute to the discussion.

In terms of the job pipeline, the biggest cut in population happens when trying to get a faculty position, not at the tenure stage. In reasonable departments, no one is happy when a tenure promotion case fails. Good departments (and schools and universities) try very hard to filter at the hiring level and give their faculty the resources they need to succeed. I can only think of two or three places (in physics anyway) that historically have had a "sink or swim" attitude (that is, hiring a junior person in an area today means that seven years from now the university wants the best senior person in the world in that area - being in-house is not advantage), and I'm not sure that's even true anymore.

Generally advice is not in short supply, though good advice can be. Many institutions are setting up official mentoring efforts to ensure that junior candidates have people to talk to about these issues. A colleague of mine found several nice documents online about this issue of advice-giving and receiving. This one (pdf), from the ADVANCE program at the University of Michigan, is particularly good. I am hardly in a position to give too much sage advice about tenure, and what follows below is largely common sense. Obviously the situation is different in various disciplines and at different universities, but here's some basic points that I think should be considered. I'm sure I'll leave things out - feel free to chide me in the comments.

Understand the process. Find out how the tenure process works at your institution. This should be written down in a faculty handbook. Talk to your department chair, your faculty mentor (if your department has such a thing) or senior colleagues. Understand the timeline. Get a sense of the weight that your institution places on the different components of the job (see below). Does the departmental vote carry a lot of weight (as it usually does at Rice, for example), or are the deans or the university promotions and tenure (P&T) committee commonly overriding departmental decisions?

The process probably goes something like this: the candidate is hired for a 4-year tenure-track appointment, with some kind of annual reviews and a more major renewal review in year 3 or 4. (This gives the university a chance to end the process early if there's a major problem with an assistant prof, and forces departments to give some concrete feedback to the assistant prof about how they stand.) In the summer before year 6 (at most places) the candidate is asked to put together a dossier (complete CV, reprints of papers, a summary of funding, a statement about university service, a statement about teaching, a summary of research accomplishments, etc.) and suggest names for external evaluators. The department comes up with additional names for external evaluation, and sends the full dossier to some mix of the external people. Eventually these external letters come back, and the department reads them, puts the whole package together, and there's a vote of the tenured faculty (in October or November) about whether to recommend the assistant prof for tenure. The departmental recommendation then goes to the cognizant dean, and from there to the university P&T committee (which generally would have people from all sorts of disciplines on there, from bio to French lit). Sometimes P&T committees or deans can request more external letters, and they get copies of teaching evaluations, etc., and may meet directly with department chairs. Eventually the P&T committee makes its decisions (in late spring) and the candidate finds out. That decision is finally signed off by the president of the university and the board of trustees.

The research component. To get tenure you need actually need to be getting science done. There's no sure-fire recipe for success here, but let me make a few suggestions:

Have a mix of projects that range from easier to high-risk/high-reward. Having only one major project can be very risky, particularly if it takes five years to get any results. One key element of getting tenure is that people in your community need to know who you are, what you've done, and what you've been doing that's really yours - new stuff from your professorial position, not rehash of your thesis or postdoc work.
Make sure that your colleagues know what you're doing. Your colleagues are going to need to understand your work at least on some level, and particularly for hard projects, they will need to have some idea why it may take four years before a paper comes out.
Have backup plans. High risk things may not succeed (no kidding.). Make sure, for your students' sake and yours, that you have thought out the projects well, so that even if you don't achieve the BIG goal, you are still learning useful things that are worth publishing.
Have a high attempt frequency for funding. If there's literally only one agency in the world that funds your work, that's risky and unfortunate. Make sure that you know what your options are for funding sources. Call up program officers. Ask to get a chance to serve on review panels - you'll learn a huge amount about writing proposals that way! Know if there are state funding opportunities. Think ahead about private foundations (e.g., Research Corporation).
Do some self-promotion but don't sell your soul. If your external evaluators don't know who you are, that's the kiss of death. Make sure you give talks at meetings. See what you can do about getting invited to give seminars at other schools. Yes, this is one issue where "well-connected" people really benefit, but if you go to meetings and get to know the people in your field, it's not that bad. Get involved in your own department's seminar series, and invite in people that you'd like to meet and talk to.
Publish good stuff. This is always the tricky bit, and people joke about the "least publishable unit". Still, holding back everything for the one big Nature paper that may not happen is not necessarily the best strategy, for you or your students.
Get stuff going relatively quickly. Think about the timescales associated with publications and citations. Even if you do the greatest piece of work in your field ever, if you don't get it out the door at least a year or two before your tenure review (that is, a year before letters get sent out to external reviewers), it's going to be very hard for that work to have had much of an impact by the time of the decision.

The teaching component. Do a good job teaching. Most universities have resources available to help you - teaching centers that will videotape your lectures, offer suggestions for improved technique, etc. Good teaching can only help tenure in limited ways at a research university, but poor teaching can certainly hurt a borderline case. People joke that getting excessively good teaching evaluations is a sign of misallocated time. That's not necessarily the case. The skills that you learn to be a good lecturer in the classroom overlap quite a bit with the skills you need to present research well - organization, an appreciation for your audience's perspective and knowledge, clarity, etc.

The mentoring component. This is related to both of the above. It definitely helps make the case that you are running a successful research and education enterprise if you can actually graduate students. This means making sure that they are making real progress, publishing papers (and/or patents), and ideally enabling them to land a good job (postdoc or industry) afterwards. This is not just altruistic; it's also enlightened self-interest - if you build a reputation for getting good people out in a reasonable timeframe and with real job prospects, it will help in graduate and postdoc recruiting in the long term. Managing a group isn't easy, and every student is different. If you feel like you're having trouble, definitely find colleagues to ask for advice! Every faculty research mentor has been there.

The service component. Do a decent job in departmental and university service. Don't let it eat all your time, but get involved in things that matter to you. It's also a good way to get to know your administrators and people in other departments. I'm not suggesting currying favor - just be a solid citizen. Becoming known as a pain-in-the-ass on this is not going to help you on any level.

Common sense. People argue about whether blogging can hurt your tenure chances. Blogging is only one example of a public forum, though. Use some common sense. Publicly badmouthing your institution, colleagues, administrators, etc. is not a good idea. (I'm not talking about hushing up legitimate grievances - I'm saying don't antagonize people gratuitously.) Remember, in a practical sense, the tenure decision is based not just on your scientific quality, but on whether you are the kind of colleague that people want to have for the next n years.

Don't panic. At some point, you just have to buckle down and do the work without inducing a psychodrama about the process. If you've been in a graduate program, you've undoubtedly known someone who, rather than actually solving their research problems, spent their time kvetching about how nothing was working. Don't do that to yourself. Remember, you're doing this because you enjoy it intellectually (at least, some of the time!).

Talk this week

2008-04-13T20:46:00.004-05:00

First, to the readers of this blog, thanks for the recent trend of posting informative links in the comments. I think that this really adds something to the discussion. One tip: in the comments you're allowed to use html tags, so if you want to post a link with a long URL, you may want to write the html that actually posts the link.

This week we had a fun physics colloquium given by Paul Canfield of Ames Lab and Iowa State University. He spoke about the discovery and characterization of new materials, with a particular emphasis on heavy fermion compounds, but with a significant discussion of MgB₂ as well. His main purpose was to convey how physicists like him think and approach problems, and I think he succeeded. He also had a funny slide called "Periodic Table According to Most Physicists" that looked roughly like this:


H                                       H' (almost like hydrogen)
H'' H'''                  C       H'''' H'''''
                        Si
        Metals       Cu

                     Au

   Elements that may not even be real


         |<---Not on the final exam --->|
         |<---Stuff for bombs  -------->|

Amusing stuff.

Your tax dollars at work.

2008-04-11T22:20:00.002-05:00

Like many of my colleagues, I review lots of grant proposals. Recently I was asked to review one for the Department of Energy, and when I said 'yes', they sent me the proposal. By Federal Express. On a CD. Now, you might wonder why, if they don't mind me ending up with this in an electronic format anyway, and if they want me to send in my review electronically, they wouldn't just handle this purely over the web, and save the money and environmental impact of shipping a CD from northern VA to Houston. Ahh well.

Talks this week

2008-04-04T22:21:00.002-05:00

I saw some very good talks this week. First up was a physics colloquium by Stuart Parkin from IBM Almaden. In some very real sense, you're reading this because of Parkin - he and his team were the people who first took giant magnetoresistance (GMR) and developed it into a useful technology in the read heads of hard disk drives. The remarkable explosion in data storage capacity over the last decade and a half is largely due to this advance, possibly the best example of true nanotechnology (the film thicknesses involved in spin valves are a few nm) making it out of the lab and into manufacturing and consumer products. Their later work on tunneling magnetoresistance has also now been transferred into hard drive read heads. In fact, TMR heads with MgO tunnel barriers between ferromagnetic layers can have room temperature resistance changes of several hundred percent in the presence of few-Oersted fields like those from drive media. After reviewing all of this at just the right level, Parkin went on to talk a bit about his latest ideas and work on high performance "racetrack" memory. In this idea, a single transistor cell can be responsible for reading and writing tens of bits of memory (as opposed to one in current RAM designs). The bits are stored as domain walls in a ferromagnetic nanowire. The walls can be detected through their local change in the magnetization, and they can be moved by pulsing spin-polarized currents through the ferromagnetic wires. All in all, a great colloquium - one of my colleagues wished that we'd taped it so that we could show it to job candidates as an example of a real general audience colloquium.

There was also a workshop on campus this week about probabilistic and nanoscale computing that featured some nice talks. One of the best was by Tom Theis, head of physical sciences research at IBM, who reviewed their latest developments and the future of the field-effect transistor from his perspective. Anyone who has alternative ideas in mind about computing technologies really needs to do their homework by listening to someone like Theis, who has perspective about the science as well as the economic and manufacturing issues.

Yet more superconductivity fun.

2008-03-31T20:49:00.004-05:00

Even more excitement on the novel FeAs-based superconductors. By my count there are seven more papers (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) on tonight's arxiv update, including two different groups demonstrating transition temperatures exceeding 50 K in the Nd version of the compound, and one showing 52 K in the Pr version. Gee, this makes my comments here look prescient. For my next trick, again guided by the periodic table, I suggest that we'll see more rare earth variations. For example, there's no reason not to try the comparatively stable actinides (thorium, protactinium, uranium), or the mostly-filled-f-shell lanthanides (thulium, ytterbium, lutetium) as opposed to the mostly-empty-f-shell ones (La, Ce, Pr). Given that pressure boosts T_c (see paper 1 above), one could try duplicating the effect of pressure by creating more internal stress within the lattice via substitutions of larger atoms between the FeAs layers. Of course, it's easy for me to say this stuff, since I don't actually have to make the compounds....

It's also worth noting that early photoemission data and heat capacity measurements on a couple of the compounds strongly suggest that the superconducting gap is zero (or darned close to it) on at least part of the Fermi surface. This is the case for the cuprates, and exactly not the case in conventional low temperature superconductors.

Outreach can be fun.

2008-03-30T14:28:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I did an "Ask a scientist" event at the Children's Museum of Houston, as part of their Nano Days events. It was fun. I started with the obligatory "sizes of things" slide, and then talked a little about scientists (who want to figure out how things work) and engineers (who want to take what we've learned and make new, useful things). To emphasize that nanoscale tech was all around them, I showed the guts of a Nintendo Wii, including the cell processor and the little accelerometer chip that the Wii uses to figure out what you're doing with the controller. I had made a demo accelerometer prop out of PVC pipe and springs that was a big hit. The most fun part was when I invited the kids up to help me take apart a Wii-mote, while I explained that sometimes breaking things down is the best way to figure out how things work. The high point: an eight-year-old whispering "Awwwwsome!" to his friend after playing with the guts of the Wii-mote. (Note: opening up any Nintendo gear requires this kind of screwdriver....)

A nice piece of physics with an elegant consequence

2008-03-30T14:16:00.004-05:00

Kuzmenko et al. from Geneva have a PRL out this week titled "Universal Optical Conductance of Graphite". This is a pretty physics result, where the authors find theoretically and demonstrate experimentally that the optical conductivity of graphite is quantized - each graphene sheet has, at optical frequencies, a sheet conductance that is (\pi/2) e²/h. This is a consequence of the particular band structure of graphene, and I think it's rather impressive that this is robust even when there are multiple graphene layers. You might imagine, a priori, that the interlayer coupling would kill this kind of universality.

Nair et al., in a preprint, arrive at essentially the same result, but present the data in a much more dramatic way that does a great job of emphasizing the consequences of the physics. Many people don't have a good intuition for what optical conductivity means. Nearly everyone, though, has a decent sense of what optical absorption means. These folks demonstrate that the quantized optical conductivity implies that the white light absorption of graphite is quantized (!) in units of the fine structure constant (!!), so that each additional graphene layer absorbs 2.3% of the light incident on it, even though each layer is just one atom thick. The figures in the paper, particularly the last one, do a great job of making this point.

The take-home message about presentation: having a compelling physics story to tell is good, and casting it in terms that a general audience can appreciate with some intuition is even better.