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Faculty Lunch and Discussion Date Speaker Location June 3 Xie Chen 114 East Bridge May 13 Dave Hsieh 114 East Bridge April 29 Jason Alicea 114 East Bridge April 15 Daniel Silevitch B157 West Bridge February 26 Alexei Kitaev 114 East Bridge February 12 Rana Adhikari 114 East Bridge January 29 Linda Ye 114 [...]
The night before defending my Masters thesis, I ran out of shampoo. I ran out late enough that I wouldn’t defend from beneath a mop like Jack Sparrow’s; but, belonging to the Luxuriant Flowing-Hair Club for Scientists (technically, if not officially), I’d have to visit Shopper’s Drug Mart. The author’s unofficially Luxuriant [...]
Transforming the STEM Pipeline into a River The traditional metaphor of the “leaky pipeline” tracks the number of students entering the educational system and emphasizes points at which women and minority students leave the system. IQIM is working to increase diversity on our campus and more broadly in STEM by encouraging a [...]
Faculty, Topological Quantum Physics
This year marks the 50th anniversary of my first publication. In 1964, when we were eleven-year-old fifth graders, my best friend Mace Rosenstein and I launched The Pres-stein Gazette, a not-for-profit monthly. Though the first issue sold well, the second issue never appeared. Front page of the inaugural issue of the Pres-stein Gazette. Faded [...]
Walter Burke Editor's Note: Yesterday and today, Caltech is celebrating the inauguration of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. John Preskill made the following remarks at a dinner last night honoring the board of the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. This is an exciting night for me and all of us at Caltech. Tonight [...]
On last week’s “Welcome to the math olympics”, I closed with a problem from the International Math Olympiad of 1981 (a bad year for wine – I would know, I was an avid drinker back then). I would like to take some time to present a solution to this problem, because this is where all [...]
I was excited to hear that Charlie Kane, Laurens Molenkamp and Shoucheng Zhang were among the recipients of the 2013 Physics Frontiers Prize. Their seminal works both theoretically predicting and experimentally discovering the topological insulator have profoundly influenced the direction of condensed matter physics over the past few years and have shaped my own research [...]
This post is about generating a special type of light, squeezed light, using a mechanical resonator. But perhaps more importantly, it’s about an experiment (Caltech press release can be found here) that is very close to my heart: an experiment that brings to an end my career as a graduate student at Caltech and the [...]
A few weeks ago, my friend Amanda, an elementary school teacher who runs a children’s camp during the summer break, suggested that it could be fun for me to come into the camp one day and do some science demonstrations for the kids. I jumped at the opportunity, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact [...]