Everybody's physics
It is evident that even with this year’s evolution in the recognition of women’s achievements, the Nobel prizes are still a bastion of inequality.
a contribution to our humans of physics series by Shirin Ermis, originally published at https://felixonline.co.uk
If you ask an author what their everyday life looks like, they will hardly ever answer: “Well, I’m just writing!” because combining letters into a meaningful text requires much more than the mere act of ‘writing’. Let me compare the work of a PhD student with that of the author: To say that my PhD is about performing computations on a black screen simply wouldn’t say enough. Both writing a book and calculating climate variables involves long research, practice of methodology, discussion with colleagues, many imperfect trials, and tedious bureaucracy. It requires the will to gain a holistic understanding of a specific topic,and the vision of contributing to society.
Continue reading “Humans of Physics VI: Beatrice Ellerhoff” →This is the fifth installment of Humans of Physics, a series focusing in the researchers more than in the research, for once.
The first time I entered in the room where the cold atom experiment was, I couldn’t express what I felt… Wires everywhere, optical fibers sending lasers all over the room, a metallic vacuum chamber hidden by a huge amount of copper wire, optical fibers and water cooled magnetic coils… A big mess. My supervisor asked me to have a look inside the vacuum chamber through a thick glass. After five minutes trying to find the right angle I finally saw it. A red bubble surrounded by darkness. This was a billion atoms trapped in the vacuum… I was really impressed.
Vienna, 12th of October, 2019:
Eliud Kipchoge became the first human to run a sub 2-hour marathon. Once believed to be unattainable, his time, 1:59:40, will not be officially recognized as a world record [1]. The reason for this is that the experiment to run 26.2 miles in under two hours was conducted under specific conditions which are not comparable to standard racing situations. Having an electric car and a team of 41 world-class runners in front of him, setting the pace, he broke “the last barrier of modern athletics”. Or to put it in his own words: “Vienna is about running and breaking history, like the first man on the moon.” Continue reading “Is quantum advantage moving too fast for you to keep up?” →
Pictorial Quantum Simulation: Atoms are sitting in a lattice built up by standing light waves, ready to be used for studying the most intriguing questions of state of the art research.
Supercomputers are cornerstones of modern industry. They help to design complicated objects like aircraft, provide the handling of big data sets in AI, trade shares at stock exchanges and set the standards for today’s encryption. However, there exist highly complex problems involving the smallest building blocks of our world which cannot be solved on these supercomputers yet. Continue reading “Quantum Simulation Cookbook” →
Many Body Physics