Write your congressperson to support science during COVID-19

APS President Phil Bucksbaum recently wrote a letter with recommendations for how congress can protect science during COVID-19 and ensure a quick recovery afterwards. “The letter’s recommendations include: providing grantees full or partial cost extensions, ensuring the supplemental funding necessary to restart labs and experiments is provided, and substantially increasing REU funding for Summer 2021.”

APS is also organizing a letter-writing campaign to call Congress’s attention to this issue. They’re provided a easy-to-use tool where you can plug in your voting address, sign your letter (and add some of your own thoughts) and they will send it off to your congressperson and senators. It takes less than five minutes and it makes a huge difference. On narrow issues like this, you letter might be the only one your elected official receives!

Sign and send your letter now!

New Stack Exchange for Matter Modeling

Some of my colleagues have worked very hard to build up a Materials Matter Modeling Stack Exchange forum, currently in beta. They need more contributors to graduate to a full-fledged forum, so I encourage anyone reading this to join at materials.stackexchange.com (you will have to create an account to join the private beta, but it’s super easy). Much of the discussion is currently on computational chemistry methods like DFT, but the admins are actively seeking more physics content to differentiate themselves from existing Stack Exchange forums.

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Rest in peace Phil Anderson, a giant on whose shoulders we stand

On Sunday March 29, Philip W. Anderson passed away.  Anderson is doubtlessly one of the greatest condensed matter physicists who ever lived.

Anderson made foundational discoveries in localization, high-temperature superconductivity and antiferromagnetism. Indeed, his achievements stretch beyond condensed matter; his work on spontaneous symmetry breaking contributed to development of the Standard Model of particle physics. I’m sure many more competent people will eulogize him (update 2020-05-04 they have), but I wanted share one specific personal connection I have to his work.

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Link

I put together a collection of links and resources for how to stay safe and sane during the pandemic as a page on my website. I thought these were important to share, but I didn’t want to post them individually. I plan to update that page, so if you have suggestions for things to add, please let me know.

Spinons: what are they and what do they do?

Updated 2020-03-22

One problem with scientific publishing is that the most up-to-date information about a topic is spread out across numerous extremely technical journal articles, none of which explains the concept from scratch. In response to a request from a friend (see previous post), I thought I would take a little time to try to answer the question: “what is a spinon?”

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Rep. James Himes

CVD success: Rep. Himes co-sponsors the Keep STEM Talent Act!

For the APS Congressional Visit Day last month, my team visited the DC office of Representative Jim Himes (D-CT-04) to advocate for a number of issues important to science (see previous post). One of our asks was for Rep. Himes to cosponsor the Keep STEM Talent Act. I just heard that Rep. Himes is now a cosponsor! Thanks so much to my CVD team, to Rep. Himes and to the staffer we met with, Jessica Hagens-Jordan!

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Join the new APS Forum on Diversity and Inclusion!

APS has a new forum dedicated to diversity and inclusion (announcement). This has been in the works for a while, but it’s finally approved and ready to join (for free for APS members). Join now to get in on the ground floor! Below I am copying the email I received with more details and signup instructions (sorry if the formatting is weird).

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