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New directions for intergroup meetings

New directions for intergroup meetings. Tom Lancaster. What are we trying to do?. We’re hoping to make talks more accessible, wide-ranging and interesting Less emphasis on technical descriptions of your most recent results

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New directions for intergroup meetings

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  1. New directions for intergroup meetings Tom Lancaster

  2. What are we trying to do? • We’re hoping to make talks more accessible, wide-ranging and interesting • Less emphasis on technical descriptions of your most recent results • Talks can be introductory, speculative, provocative and outside the immediate field of materials physics.

  3. Particular suggestions Journal club: a discussion of a scientific paper Topical physics: ideas from across physics needed to understand something in your field Personal hobby-horse: be it cookery, rocketry, electronics, music… Discussion and debates

  4. Please submit talk titles in advance • If something looks too inaccessible, we’ll ask you to think again • Please don’t be offended!

  5. Suggestions box If you have something you’d like someone to talk about send an email to chairs or to tom.lancaster@durham.ac.uk

  6. Journal club talks Pick a paper. Nature, Science, PRL, historically important

  7. Paper by L D Landau, JEPT 30, 1058 (1956) Describes a new, phenomenological model of metals

  8. Context and background • What problem is being discussed? • Why is this important? • Who is writing the paper?

  9. The fermi gas treats electrons as non-interacting It describes metals very well, but it shouldn’t Electrons interact very strongly – is there a better way? Lev Landau invented much of condensed matter physics, his answer to this question caused a revolution.

  10. What’s in the paper • What are the important results described? • What do the authors conclude?

  11. Fermi liquid made of quasiparticles – one for each electron Excitations are unstable, but the ones near the Fermi energy live the longest Landau’s expansion of the energy allows him to describe the system with only a few parameters

  12. What do you think of the paper? • Are the results convincing? • Can someone else do better • Keep literary criticism to a minimum!

  13. What do you think of the paper? • Are the results convincing? • Can someone else do better • Keep literary criticism to a minimum! Early Chinese chemists could not have imagined two thousand years ago that BaCuSi2O6 was not only an attractive purple pigment but also a potential solid state device for exploring the quantum effects of a BEC at liquid 4He temperatures in magnetic fields. (PRL 93, 087203 (2004))

  14. Landau’s paper is very sketchy – it’s hard to know what the big idea is It turned out to be incredibly important – the standard model of CMP It’s a work of genius!

  15. Future work • What next for this field? • How does this paper fit into the grand scheme

  16. Guide to talks • Keep them short • Make it simple • Keep slides uncluttered • Everyone likes history, psychology, sociology… • Avoid length conclusions! • See N D Mermin, Physics Today, November 1992, page 9.

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