Brian Skinner

@gravity_levity

90% vacuous views, apathetically held. But stick around for the other 10%.

Joined September 2009

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    27 Nov 2019

    New paper on a quantum system that can only partially decohere, and therefore at long time has dynamics that are neither classical nor quantum: Understanding this system comes down to the statistical mechanics of a process that looks like this:

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  2. Still, the horror that Scott Aaronson describes, of seeing the financially/politically empowered deal with science, is a very real one.

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  3. I can appreciate that this might be an instance of the internet doing a thing it loves to do: Take a quote by someone that's meant to be a folksy analogy, and then exclaim with exaggerated comic horror "Wait, this person LITERALLY believes X!?!?"

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  4. Retweeted
    Replying to

    Arvind Krishna has a fully earned Ph.D. In Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois (1991). He was previously the head of IBM research and I assure you he actually knows more about how Quantum Computing works than anyone snidely commenting on this thread.

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  5. Retweeted
    9 hours ago

    This is *sadly* for Brian, an example of a quote with not context. If you know the audience, you understand this was delivered as intended. As Scott himself mentions: "I...felt like they got a lot more out of it than the businesspeople who came to my & Jeremy O’Brien’s session".

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  7. Read the horror that is Scott Aaronson's account of how quantum computing is discussed at Davos: Here is a quote from a senior vice president at IBM:

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  8. Retweeted

    Malawian musician Gasper Nali playing his homemade instrument, the Babatoni.

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  9. Feb 1

    "We're having an 80s party!" they said. "Send us a photo of yourself from the 80s! It'll be fun!" they said. Now this photo is on prominent display in the lobby of the building where I work.

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  10. Retweeted
    Jan 31

    Procrastination is a kind of time travel

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  11. Jan 31

    You guys, the party planning committee hit this one out of the park

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  12. Jan 31

    Someone's getting a little punchy on the group overleaf

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  13. Jan 31

    25/25 Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Here is a grainy photo of me haranguing other workshop participants about the virtue of boring materials.

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  14. Jan 31

    24/ Modern experiments are getting better and better about probing this soupy-liquid at nanometer length scales and femtosecond time scales. These better "movies" might finally allow us to figure out what happens, in a huge class of "strongly correlated electron" situations.

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  15. Jan 31

    23/ Near the transition point electrons are somehow like a thick liquid: technically flowing, but poorly, and with their properties somehow arising from an interplay between their repulsion and the quantum hybridization between atom-centered wavefunctions.

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  16. Jan 31

    22/ Roughly speaking, this "Mott transition" happens when the concentration of dopants becomes high enough that it is easier energetically for electrons to be hybridized (in a quantum sense) between atoms than it is for them to each sit on one atom.

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  17. Jan 31

    21/ Finally, I'll end with the most studied-to-death material on earth: SILICON. We can do just about everything with silicon at this point, but there is one big thing we don't understand: its transition from insulating to conducting as a function of added ("dopant") atoms.

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  18. Jan 31

    20/ Second, STO can act like a metal even when the apparent mean-free-path of electrons (the distance electrons can travel before scattering off something) is even shorter than the inter-atomic distance. This is a violation of both quantum mechanics and common sense.

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  19. Jan 31

    19/ This aborted transition was understood in the 1960s, but returning to this material in the 2010s revealed more crazy things. First, STO can be a fairly robustsuperconductor with only a miniscule amount of added electrons. This is well beyond the purview of any theory we know.

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  20. Jan 31

    18/ This huge dielectric constant arises from a ferroelectric phase transition (a buckling-type instability within the atomic cell) that _almost_ happens, but is aborted by quantum fluctuations of the atom positions.

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  21. Jan 31

    17/ The poster child for the value of reconsidering old semiconductors is the crystal STRONTIUM TITANATE ("STO"). STO is a synthetic gemstone (you can buy it cheap online), which happens to have an enormous dielectric constant.

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