After some consideration, I finally made the effort to get myself a proper domain (mostlyphysics.net), and move my personal web page to a brand-spanking-new Squarespace hosting.
The blog has also moved here from Wordpress, and hopefully I'll manage to update it a bit more often than in the past year – perhaps the extra bells and whistles that this website allows will make it more interesting.
Welcome!
Philae lander revised search area. Via the New York Times. The European Space Agency's epic Rosetta mission's lost lander has woken up, as reported by the New York Times and many others.
Understanding fairly well the physical principles and the precision required for such accuracy over interplanetary distances, I find endeavors such as Rosetta to be a firm refutation of any radically subjective theories of reality.
No matter how illusory or confounded our picture of the world may be, logic and mathematics seem to grasp something objectively real, out there, uncaring and unaffected by our curiosity, yet reaffirming that science can form the basis of an accurate view of reality.
Just watched a related TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is
About 15 years ago, the world was supposed to be witnessing the start of a revolution. Scientists said so in grant proposals and white papers. Public relations officers said so in press releases. Reporters said so in magazine articles. Carbon nanotubes were going to change the world.
Read MoreI have a new article just out, published as a Rapid Communication in Physical Review B. The work is a computational study co-authored with Duncan Mowbray and Mathias Ljungberg from San Sebastian, Spain, and Paola Ayala from Vienna.
As described in the post about my recent review article, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy is an extremely useful tool for studying the composition of nanomaterials. However, to correlate measurements to actual atomic structures, we need to know their binding energies. In this work, we systematically calculate the core level binding energy of graphene using two different methods, as described in the abstract:
X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy combined with first-principles modeling is a powerful tool for determining the chemical composition and electronic structure of novel materials. Of these, graphene is an especially important model system for understanding the properties of other carbon nanomaterials. Here, we calculate the carbon 1s core level binding energy of pristine graphene using two methods based on density functional theory total energy differences: a calculation with an explicit core-hole, and an all-electron extension of the delta self-consistent field (ΔSCF) method. We study systematically their convergence and computational workload, and the dependence of the energies on the chosen exchange-correlation functional. The ΔSCF method is computationally more expensive, but gives consistently higher C 1s energies. Although there is a significant functional dependence, the binding energy calculated using the PBE functional is found to be remarkably close to what has been measured for graphite.
You can find the article on the PRB website, or in manuscript form on arXiv.
The first review article that I have written has just come out in the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology (CC-BY open access).
Read MoreThe WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. "Only three posts in 2014... let's see if I can do more in 2015."
Here's an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,200 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.
This post is a greatly expanded adaptation of a press release I wrote to publicize our recent work appearing in Physical Review Letters.
Read MorePeople who are into physics and follow blogs actively have surely ran into MIT physicist Scott Aaronson, probably most well known for his critiques of the alleged D-Wave quantum computer. More recently, Scott has been writing a lot about consciousness, but his latest post – prepared talk notes from the Quantum Foundations of a Classical Universe meeting – is a real doozy. It's a long read but well worth the trouble.
Read MoreI have been very negligent with updating the blog, apologies for that... Here, have some comics to make up for it!
Hilda Bastian at Scientific American Blogs recently published a very nice summary of developments in open access in the year 2013. It's remarkable how much has happened in a year. Richard Poynder's State of Open Access interviews are also a must read if you've managed to miss them until now.
Mostly Physics – the personal website of Dr. Toma Susi.
