***Update***
Huge congrats to reader dmsilev for his new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his own words,
We show that controlling the thermal coupling of cubic-centimeter–sized crystals of the Ising magnet LiHoxY1-xF4 to a heat bath can be used to tune the system between a glassy state dominated by thermal excitations over energy barriers and a state with the hallmarks of a quantum spin liquid. Application of a magnetic field transverse to the Ising axis introduces both random magnetic fields and quantum fluctuations, which can retard and speed the annealing process, respectively, thereby providing a mechanism for continuous tuning between the destination states.
We hope that his career can recover from being even indirectly associated with this blog.
Belafon
Did another thread appear briefly, disappear, and then this show up?
Gin & Tonic
@Belafon: Looked that way to me.
Tim F.
@Belafon: Don’t know. If you mean Richard’s it is still there (sorry for bigfooting, etc). Otherwise I never saw it.
dmsilev
Nice day at work today; our article in PNAS was just published.
Gin & Tonic
News from The Grift Never Stops Dept. – even though Viktor Yanukovych has abandoned his office as President of Ukraine and vanished, his interests are continuing their lobbying (described in a DougJ thread the other day.) Since they (his supporters) are not directly affiliated with the government, their agents on K Street do not have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Sweet. They are spreading their sweet cash to the Podesta group, and to the Mercury Group (former Rep Vin Weber, R-MN.) The money (sorry) quote from Weber: “They have become a very controversial client, but we have no hesitation in defending our work for them,”
Elizabelle
Harold Ramis and Betty Cracker’s Mom depart this mortal coil within the same 24 hours.
Coincidence?
Villago Delenda Est
@Gin & Tonic:
Utter slime. No tumbrel ride for him, though. Summary dispatch with an ax.
JoyceH
Can I brag about my book release? I finally finished my Regency and it’s up on Amazon –
http://www.amazon.com/Feather-Fly-Joyce-Harmon-ebook/dp/B00IMMIUVY/ref=sr_1_154?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1393284888&sr=1-154
SiubhanDuinne
@dmsilev:
Congratulations! I don’t understand a word, but still … Congratulations!
The Red Pen
THIS IS A PET SHELTER BLEG.
Shorter bleg: there’s a shelter in Granite City, IL (Saint Louis metro area) that is running out of the fumes it was already running on. I’m posting the bleg here because pets. Some more details at link.
dmsilev
@Gin & Tonic: Out of morbid curiosity, what exactly are the lobbyists trying to accomplish?At this point, kind of seems like the ship has sailed.
SiubhanDuinne
@JoyceH:
Yay! And here, I do understand the words, and have just downloaded it to my Kindle. Big congratulations, Joyce!
dmsilev
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks! And yes, it is written in that obscure dialect known as science-ese. Kind of has to be, as it’s important to be precise in ones claims, assertions, and evidence.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
I assume their main goal is to suck as much money out of their client as possible. This may require piling up billable hours even though the work they’re being devoted to has been made irrelevant by ongoing events.
catclub
@dmsilev: Good question.
I guess they are pitching to leave Ukraine to the Russians who already own it. If no money comes from the west, Russia will have more influence.
Gin & Tonic
@dmsilev: I wish I knew. Funding is going through the Brussels-based European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, whose director is quoted thus “As I told you we are there to help an all inclusive dialogue…European integration of Ukraine is our priority and this requires a constant dialogue.”
“Constant dialogue,” I assume, translates to “continuing payments.” We used to call that the Personal Salary Continuation Program.
dmsilev
[looks around worryingly]
[Googles ‘how to change your identity’]
[starts drinking heavily]
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: Wouldn’t it be great if someone did an attack ad on him with his profile in front of photos of Yanuk’s palace and tacky treasures?
Would never happen, but it would be awesome.
Another Holocene Human
@dmsilev: Ye of little faith, it’s only a temporary setback, just like the last time all these jagoffs were deposed.
Didn’t a Bush make it back to the White House?!
Another Holocene Human
@JoyceH: It’s a very pretty cover, but I’m confused by your gloss–I thought the point of traditional Regency romances was to be as shallow and racy as possible within the confines of what was publishable outside of the subterranean pornography market? Though, granted, I’m taking George Eliot’s word for it.
maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor
Woof.
(Congrats).
SiubhanDuinne
@dmsilev: Oh, I understand that. I just don’t understand science-ese. I’m very glad Tim highlighted your abstract in his update, and it know there are many Juicers of the scientific persuasion who will be able to give you more knowledgeable kudos than I’m able to do.
ETA: If you feel like taking the time to dumb it down so a layperson might understand, feel free — I’d read that with interest.
ruemara
Congratulations to both authors! Sadly, I can only comprehend fully one item and there ain’t no crystals in it. I’m cleaning the house. It’s an accomplishment.
Another Holocene Human
It’s been a long time, dmsilev, but I read your abstract and it sounds like you were able to accomplish something pretty cool in the lab. How did you know what state the crystals were in, was it visible? Congrats on getting published!!
Paul in KY
@dmsilev: Congratulations! Big thing getting published like that.
low-tech cyclist
@dmsilev:
1) Congratulations!
2) I like the ‘significance’ paragraph, since that’s written in something that’s essentially English. I’d say the short version for us laypersons would be “here’s yet one more way that physics gets very weird near absolute zero.”
Paul in KY
@JoyceH: Way to go! Writing & getting published is a great accomplishment!
The Red Pen
Freepers are already looking for emails to prove that this is hoax.
srv
While I don’t understand any of that, I’m pretty sure it would not help me deal with a Zombie Apocolypse.
Congrats.
dmsilev
@SiubhanDuinne: I can try to translate, at least to some extent. The point of the exercise is the ‘annealing’ process, which is the process by which a complicated system finds its happy place (or “free energy minimum” in techie-speak). Understanding this process is important not just for the sake of understanding but because these complicated systems can be mapped to problems we want to solve that are difficult to solve using regular computers. The most famous problem of this sort is the Traveling Salesman Problem. The annealing process is then equivalent to settling on a specific solution to that problem.
Now, there are a couple of different ways in which annealing can happen in these systems. The traditional approach is what’s called thermal annealing, where you start at a high temperature and gradually cool. As it cools, the system reorders itself and gradually settles into a solution. The issue is that it may not settle into the “best” solution, and finding the actual best solution can be very very slow. One way around this is through what’s called quantum annealing, where through the magic of quantum mechanics, you can jump back and forth between different possible solutions that might not be easily available through a thermal process.
What my coworkers and I did was look at the “solution” arrived at by a particular system (which happens to be a crystal filled with magnetic atoms) under conditions of both thermal and quantum annealing, and show that the final solutions are different. One is not necessarily better than the other (“better” doesn’t have much meaning for our particular test case), but they’re qualitatively different, and this means that for people trying to build an actual quantum computer, the answers they get out may depend on the path they take to a solution and those answers can be significantly different depending on which path you follow.
taylormattd
Wow, dmsilev. PNAS, that’s fantastic!
dmsilev
@Another Holocene Human: Not visible to the naked eye, no. A photo of the sort of crystal we used can be seen here, though the actual one for this experiment was somewhat larger. You measure them by wrapping coils of wire around them, poking them with magnetic fields, and seeing how they respond. In particular, we using oscillating magnetic fields and vary the rate at which they oscillate; how the response from the crystal changes as a function of that oscillation rate tells you a lot about the state of the magnetic spins inside the crystal.
EDIT: I should add that the chip at the end of the crystal in that photo was for a different experiment. That chip is a device called a Hall magnetometer, which is another way of sensing magnetic fields. It’s actually an automotive tachometer sensor ($0.75) and that particular model turns out to work nicely at 0.05 degrees above absolute zero.
lurker dean
congratulations! although i hope you didn’t have to use any of that fuzzy “using letters instead of numbers” math. lol
SuperHrefna
@taylormattd: Yes, big congratulations!!
SuperHrefna
@lurker dean: And kept pi to a patriotic, god-fearing value of 3
Another Holocene Human
@dmsilev: wow, that is really cool
traveling salesman is near and dear to my heart
Ferdzy
Congratulations to dmsilev and JoyceH! I confess I am in the group far more likely to read the works of JoyceH. But I wish you both lots of success.
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
Funny how semi-pornographic fiction directly primarily at women is dismissible, but semi-pornographic fiction directed primarily at men is perfectly respectable (because it’s about important stuff like SPIES! and the MILITARY!).
You’d almost think there was some sexism involved in the assessment, wouldn’t you?
SiubhanDuinne
@dmsilev:
Thank you very much for that explanation. I kinda sorta get it now, and I truly appreciate your taking the time to provide a translation.
Another Holocene Human
@dmsilev: A six-bit component–now I know I’m dealing with a REAL physicist! That’s epic.
Too bad it’s not visible but somehow I figured it would not be. Don’t worry, somebody is working on their computer simulation right now. :DD
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: Since when is that rot respectable? Isn’t it called even by its authors “pulp”? As in, headed for the recycle bin?!?!
Although I suppose Tom Clancy has achieved the respectability that can only be conferred by buckets of cold, hard cash.
Cervantes
How long has he been commenting here? (About six years.)
And how many papers has he had in PNAS alone in that time? (Four.)
And how many before he started commenting here? (Zero.)
I rest my case.
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
Since it was directed at men. But you already knew that. How often do you see Clancy’s work held up for public ridicule the way that, say, Danielle Steele’s work is?
ETA: Dashiell Hammett — respectable. Daphne DuMaurier — mockery. Do I need to go on?
srv
Science says your dog really does understand you.
dmsilev
@Cervantes: I feel obliged to point out that correlation is not causation…
gogol's wife
@dmsilev:
Congratulations. If I recall correctly (forgive me if I don’t), you’re a fellow Slovak!
dmsilev
@gogol’s wife: Close, but not quite. I’m of Russian/Polish descent.
liberal
@Gin & Tonic: there’s the example of aipac.
Cervantes
@dmsilev: Ingrate!
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: I don’t see much mockery of Hammett or DuMaurier. Ludlum and Steele? Yes. Dan Brown? Certainly.
JoyceH
@Another Holocene Human:
RACY? Have you ever read Heyer? She invented the Regency genre and if her hero and heroine kissed on the final page you could count yourself lucky.
Sherparick
From Brother Pierce, more Peak Wingnut. How do their brains not just explode. The world wonders.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Katrina_Pierson_On_Your_Dime
Katrina Pierson: Texas’ Tax Dollars At Work
Katrina Pierson is the “Tea Party” challenger to Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas. I noticed that, in a national roundup of said challengers in the New York Times, that, at a difficult time in her life, Pierson had been busted for shoplifting, and that she had copped to it quite openly, but that she had concocted an interesting explanation for what she had done.
Her own candidacy is an illustration of the frustrations and limitations of the Tea Party. As of her most recent campaign filing for the second half of last year, she had raised only $76,000. She has an arrest record for shoplifting, which she openly acknowledges and cites as an example of how she turned a life of desperation and dependence on the government into an American success story…..
…Your tax dollars at work, Texans.
She certainly has had to overcome a remarkable amount of government slavery to get where she is today — at the very peak of Wingnut Mountain.
Pierson has been a hyperactive tea party organizer for years, doing countless media appearances and traveling extensively around the country to spread her message. When I first met her in the summer of 2011, she was teaching a darkly conspiratorial class on the United Nation’s “Agenda 21″ at a meeting of the Waco Tea Party. Under the UN’s aegis, she told the frightened crowd, Americans would be forced into crowded apartment buildings, and UN-empowered block captains would be “given police power over your neighborhoods.” When I asked about her activist career, she told me that when “you realize that you’ve been lied to your whole life, it’s an eye-opening experience.” To spread her message, she told me she’d taught classes in Florida, Iowa, Arizona, Kansas, Missouri, Washington D.C., and all over Texas. It was her full-time job. It had to be, she said, because “our time is limited.” Since then, she’s ramped up her activity. She’s a frequent guest on Fox News.
Elie
Congrats, dmsilev! Career and other life accomplishments are grand and to be completely celebrated!
Frankly however, coming on this blog helps keep me sane — honestly — I so appreciate it..
Bighorn Ordovician Dolomite
Congratulations dmsilev!
Although I must confess that even with a Master’s degree as an applied scientician (industrial hygienist) it would’ve taken me weeks of research to understand your abstract!
Kudos indeed.
Cephalus Max
@dmsilev: Whoa, PNAS… Not too shabby. Congrats!
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Who gets read in college classes as modern literature, Hammett or DuMaurier? Both were hugely popular in their time and had famous movies made of their work, but somehow DuMaurier has slipped off the literature list. Because mysteries are respectable, but romances are icky.
ETA: You can take entire college courses in mystery novels. Romances? Not so much.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Publication congratulations to both!
Karen in GA
@dmsilev: @JoyceH: Congratulations to you both!
Hillary Rettig
Congrats dmsilev! I was solving that problem just the other day! :-)
Congrats also to JoyceH on the publication of her new Regency romance!
I wish BJ would have a weekly news thread where we could all post our news, accomplishments, and also job and other opportunity for others. It would be a great service to the community.
raven
Terrific, I sit here trying to figure out if I need a Desert Cooler radiator for my 66 Chevy and this is the kind of stuff BJr’s do!
Congrats!
Svensker
@Mnemosyne:
Would you call du Maurier a romance novelist? I certainly wouldn’t! She is her own genre.
Congrats to the our two authors!
Roxy
@JoyceH: Just downloaded it to my Kindle. I read the first two chapters and I got hooked.
Roxy
Congrats dmsilev and JoyceH
RSA
@dmsilev: Thanks for the translation. And congratulations!
Joel
There you go, flogging your PNAS all over the place.
Interrobang
@Mnemosyne: I agree with you, but I did do a university course called “Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Other Forms of Romance,” and while we did study Austen, Hammett wasn’t anywhere on the curriculum. (Disclosure: I went to university in Canada, where, if you do a degree in English literature, as I did, you pretty much literally do do a degree in English literature.)
PurpleGirl
dmsilev: Congrats to you and your collaborators on the paper being published. You Go Boy!
(Reminds me of my days hanging out with a then boyfriend in a solid-state physics lab at NYU and the dates postponed because he was pulling data and wanted to do “just one more run” on the little particle accelerator.)
kc
I don’t know what it means, but it sounds impressive. Congrats!
Cervantes
@Interrobang:
Princeton hosts an occasional conference on the romance novel. I’ve seen the announcements/CFPs posted here and there.
satby
Woo-hoo! Congrats to both our authors in their very different fields. I feel smarter just trying to read the first paragraph of dmsilev’s paper.
JoyfulA
@dmsilev: Congratulations! And the second set of congratulations, too! I’m impressed.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Expect a sternly worded MyFace post from $. $nowbilly.
JGabriel
Cool. Congrats, dmsilev!
Mnemosyne
@Interrobang:
I have a feeling there were a lot of dudes who threw a fit because they were going to have to read Austen before they got to Heinlein. Honestly, I’m not really sure how you get from Austen to Heinlein (or whatever British sci-fi equivalent they chose — Stephenson? Banks?), but I’m assuming that’s because your professor is much smarter than me. :-)
Lyrebird
YAY dmi!
Just got my second PLoS rejection, so what you’ve accomplished seems pretty stratospheric to me.
El Cid
@dmsilev: Congratulations. I’m just now encountering the detection and occasional control of spin states at certain locations in topological insulators, but this strikes me (a complete non-scientist) as a much more fundamental insight.
SFAW
@dmsilev:
Pa Angliskiy, pazhal’sta
Kidding aside: Congratulations! Nice work. (Well, that is, if I could understand it completely.)