As you’ve probably heard, the 2020 APS March Meeting was cancelled due to concerns over coronavirus. It was cancelled only 36 hours before it was scheduled to begin. Myself and many other scientists were already in Denver when we heard.
I just presented a talk “Quenching to field-stabilized magnetization plateaus in the unfrustrated Ising antiferromagnet” based on my preprint that I posted on arXiv last week at the Annual Meeting of the Physical Society of Taiwan at National Pingtung University in Pingtung, Taiwan. I haven’t gotten around to making a post about this paper yet (that is coming soon), but in the meantime I will post my slides from this talk here. My slides included some movies of the process of freezing in to magnetization plateaus. Since PDFs can’t include movies I will post the movies below.
Update 2020-01-24: Beall’s list has a new home: https://beallslist.net/
With your academic email address posted online, you’ll be flooded with sketchy offers inviting you to submit your manuscript to open-access journals with legitimate sounding names like “British Journal of Science” or “Cancer Research Frontiers”. These predatory journals typically do little or no peer review. One pair of scientists was even able to get a paper containing only the repeated text “Get me off your f___ing mailing list” published in the predatory International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology.
The proliferation of these journals is perhaps the chief disadvantage of the move towards open access since, in the digital age, setting up a website is nearly free, and open access journals need not convince any librarians to pay for subscriptions to make money. Instead these ‘journals’ charge huge fees to publish and conduct shoddy peer review or none at all. Some are less directly predatory, but are instead “vanity press” where they get you to pay a fee to publish your thesis with them with little editing or review.
You might also find yourself invited by [person you’ve never met/heard of] to give a talk at [prestigious conference you’ve never heard of] organized by [not a university or professional society]. When you go to register, you’ll find that it’s bizarrely expensive. I think that at least sometimes conferences are real, but like the predatory journals, they are just doing it for a profit.
At least in the case of the predatory journals, Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers (now located here)provides a great way to check if the journal is a known scam so you can end that email to your spam folder without a tinge of fear that you’re throwing away a legitimate offer. Two notes of caution here: (1) obviously just because it isn’t on the list doesn’t mean everything is above board, so still do your due diligence and (2) on the Beall’s List, you have to click through publishers, standalone journals and vanity press and search each separately.
On 27 June I have the honor of being an invited speaker at ISEAS 7: Frontiers in Materials Science at Tamkang University in Tamsui, Taiwan. My talk will be titled: Accessing quantum criticality with magnetic field effects: metamagnetism and deconfinement. I’m very much looking forward to the workshop and meeting the other attendees. Thanks very much to Prof. Chao-Hung Du of TKU for the invitation!
I was walking by the SpringerNature booth at the March Meeting and the agent I worked with (Sam Harrison) pointed out that a print copy of my dissertation was there, on display and for sale! Truly a surreal experience!
Me and my dissertation on display at the March Meeting. Thanks to Sam Harrison for taking this picture for me.
I just finished presenting my March Meeting talk, Infinite boundary conditions as a current source for impurity conductance in a quantum wire. Slides here.
I’m about to set off to Boston for the APS March Meeting 2019 (March 4-8). I’ll be presenting my newest work on using infinite boundary conditions are current reservoirs for measuring steady-state currents in quantum wires using tensor network methods. My talk is at Wednesday 6 March at 8:48am in room 156C. If you want to chat with me at the March Meeting drop me a line.
After the March Meeting I’ll be visiting the Sandvik group at Boston University 11-20 March. I’m really looking forward to seeing all my old friends and colleagues at BU.
Last week I was back in Hsinchu for the three-day Annual Meeting of the Taiwan Physical Society.
This conference was very local: only about 10% of the participants were from abroad (I’m uncertain if that figure includes people like me). They were nonetheless able to get some pretty good invited speakers including my PhD supervisor, Anders Sandvik, and Nobel Laureate and former US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. I was honored to shake Secretary Chu’s hand at the banquet (unfortunately, there is no selfie).
I gave a talk based on thermodynamics of deconfined spinons in a magnetic field, the same topic as my poster from the ICAM-NCTS.
I had great conversations with Taiwanese physicists, including some new potential collaborators. I was also able to catch up with my PhD supervisor, Anders Sandvik to discuss some aspects of the modifications I am making to my QMC code in order to measure off-diagonal imaginary-time correlations.
As a bonus, while walking from my hotel to the conference I stumbled upon the NTHU Research Reactor. I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a nuclear reactor, but I never managed to get a tour of the MIT research reactor (despite living only blocks away from it in Cambridge, MA). Hopefully I can get a tour of this one.
Last week I attended the NCTS-ICAM Annual Meeting and Workshop at National Tsing-Hua University (清華大學) in Hsinchu (新竹), Taiwan. It was a delightful week of presentations and discussions with condensed matter physicists from all over the world and an excellent opportunity to build my professional network here in Taiwan.
I presented my poster “Direct numerical observation of Bose-Einstein condensation of deconfined spinons” in which I use a magnetic field to induce a finite density of magnetic excitations at a deconfined quantum critical point and use thermodynamics to show that they must be deconfined spinons (an extension of Ch. 4 of my dissertation). I received some excellent feedback on my poster that will help improve my manuscript.
There were fascinating talks including David Campbell, Duncan Haldane, Nic Shannon and Suchitra Sebastian. ICAM also made the wise decision to include a panel discussion on women in physics as part of the main schedule (rather than in a parallel session or as an extra event). It was a great opportunity to hear from women physicists about the challenges they face and to get some updated data from Laura Greene (former president of APS).
Part of the conference was an excursion to 南圓 (Nanyuan), a beautiful resort in the foggy mountains near Hsinchu. We had a tour of the beautiful Chinese garden and partook in a tea ceremony.
I’m back from almost two weeks of discussions on quantum magnetism at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS, a branch of TIFR). I presented a poster on my latest findings on my study of the field-induced spinons at the deconfined quantum critical point and received some useful feedback that will help me put the finishing touches on the manuscript.
In addition to some great tutorials and research talks, I had some productive discussions with old collaborators, like Kedar Damle, and a chance to meet a number of new people in my field and talk physics. It was a really productive 8 days and I am now back in Taipei with renewed focus.
I couldn’t have nicer things to say about ICTS. Located an hour drive outside of Bengaluru, India, ICTS is essentially a little resort for physicists. Bengaluru is apparently blessed with perfect weather year-round, and ICTS makes the most of that weather with open-air courtyards and hallways. The campus is beautiful, modern, immaculately clean, and meticulously landscaped. The guest house was basically a hotel, and the cafeteria serves up delicious Indian cuisine. My thanks to the organizers (Subhro Bhattacharjee, Gang Chen, Zenji Hiroi, Ying-Jer Kao, SungBin Lee, Arnab Sen and Nic Shannon) as well as the ICTS staff who did such an excellent job with all the logistics. I hope to be back again for another workshop soon.
Adam Iaizzi, PhD （易亞丹） 