Physicist getting inspired!!

Here is something interesting... this is an absract from a paper in PNAS on doped ceria by D.A. Anderson et. al. (published date 12/2005)

"Oxides with the cubic fluorite structure, e.g., ceria (CeO2), are known to be good solid electrolytes when they are doped with cations of lower valence than the host cations. The high ionic conductivity of doped ceria makes it an attractive electrolyte for solid oxide fuel cells, whose prospects as an environmentally friendly power source are very promising. In these electrolytes, the current is carried by oxygen ions that are transported by oxygen vacancies, present to compensate for the lower charge of the dopant cations. Ionic conductivity in ceria is closely related to oxygen-vacancy formation and migration properties. A clear physical picture of the connection between the choice of a dopant and the improvement of ionic conductivity in ceria is still lacking. Here we present a quantum-mechanical first-principles study of the influence of different trivalent impurities on these properties. Our results reveal a remarkable correspondence between vacancy properties at the atomic level and the macroscopic ionic conductivity. The key parameters comprise migration barriers for bulk diffusion and vacancy–dopant interactions, represented by association (binding) energies of vacancy–dopant clusters. The interactions can be divided into repulsive elastic and attractive electronic parts. In the optimal electrolyte, these parts should balance. This finding offers a simple and clear way to narrow the search for superior dopants and combinations of dopants. The ideal dopant should have an effective atomic number between 61 (Pm) and 62 (Sm), and we elaborate that combinations of Nd/Sm and Pr/Gd show enhanced ionic conductivity, as compared with that for each element separately."

And here is a paper in Journal of Materials science on doped ceria again published by Selladurai (Anna Univ).Well I guess the first author might have been a graduate student but I am pointing out the corresponding author. The paper was out sometime last year (2007).

"Oxides with the cubic fluorite structure, e.g., ceria (CeO2), are known to be good solid electrolytes when they are doped with cations of lower valence than the host cations. The high ionic conductivity of doped ceria makes it an attractive electrolyte for solid oxide fuel cells, whose prospects as an environmentally friendly power source are very promising. In these electrolytes, the current is carried by oxygen ions that are transported by oxygen vacancies, present to compensate for the lower charge of the dopant cations. Ionic conductivity in ceria is closely related to oxygen-vacancy formation and migration properties. A clear physical picture of the connection between the choice of a dopant and the improvement of ionic conductivity in ceria is still lacking. Here we present quantum-mechanical first-principles study of the influence of different trivalent impurities on these properties. Our results reveal a remarkable correspondence between vacancy properties at the atomic level and the macroscopic ionic conductivity. The key parameters comprise migration barriers for bulk diffusion and vacancy–dopant interactions, represented by association (binding) energies of vacancy–dopant clusters. The interactions can be divided into repulsive elastic and attractive electronic parts. In the optimal electrolyte, these parts should balance. This finding offers a simple and clear way to narrow the search for superior dopants and combinations of dopants. The ideal dopant should have an effective atomic number between 61 (Pm) and 62 (Sm), and we elaborate that combinations of Nd/Sm and Pr/Gd show enhanced ionic conductivity, as compared with that for each element separately."

simply amazing... what are the odds that two people came to the exact same conclusions !! well I went over the entire paper and believe it or not they even had the exact same data, plot everything. Talk about reproducibility. This is the awesome I have heard people say reproducible data but Dr S. Selladurai's group took a giant leap and reproduced the entire paper.

inspired!!!!

well last weekend I spend some time listening to some music and I found out that there is a new (hey I dont follow it as much I should) music director in hindi movies... Pritam. Well first of all I did hear the song Ya ali from gangster and I had heard the original arabic version too. I thought may be just one out of quite of few of his hits. well it seems that most of his hits song are actually copies all around the world. Apart from the usual middle eastern, Tarkan he did not even spare Korean, Indonesian and far east music.

Here

is a site which lists his hit songs and the original version of the same

The issue here is can we just say it is just inspired from another artist or just plagiarism. Karan Thapar had a segment on this issue and he picked two music directors- Anu Mallik and Pritam (two poster boys for music plagiarism). It is a must watch... Pritam seems to think that getting the tune is just 15% of the job and the difficult part is trying to re-do so to speak. Well if the bollywood movie industry is so much against video piracy.. hmmm should I go further.

Well just in case Pritam does accidentally bump into this blog.. I do agree that sometime people get inspired but there is definitely a clear difference between inspired and copying. Not making sense here is an example.. this is an slightly old song of Ofra Haza (a wonderful Israeli singer)


And this is a Deva's Tamil song which has similar begining



I think although it has a similar beginning the rest of the song is different. May be again may be this is called inspired. (For the record Deva is also known to steal songs completely in many occasions)

Now what about "the not so inspired but rather copied" here is a song from the Korean soap opera




And this is Pritam's Peheli Nazar from the movie Race .. and yeah if you look at the time line when the songs came you can figure who copied whom :)




It is so interesting some years ago there was a similar claim in particle physics. A group from Kumaon University did a direct copy of Renata Kallosh paper word by word and got is published in some journal. Well after people figured it out the axe fell on the graduate student not on his advisor. More info

here

Colbert explains BGH

Steven Colbert explains recombinant bovine growth hormone...

Documentary

well I am creating a list of must see documentaries.. first in the series is "The Corporation" . I watched it some years go I watched it again today. Part of the reason is something I remembered from Farid Zakaria (GPS show host in CNN) a few weeks ago during the height of economic meltdown. Well in conclusion Farid question if the economic meltdown is an indication of the failure of free market/globalization. He answers that it is not and goes on to explain that no economic model is perfect but the free market model is self correcting and that it will correct and in due course of time will evolve into this perfect model. (I am not exactly quoting him but this is what he meant). I am no economist but I have my own doubts about this claim. I just remembered this documentary "The Corporation" so true and will also explain why a non supervised, de-regulated, freemarket might not be the solution. On a good note you can watch it legally for free in google videos.
Some other documentaries I watched recently

*The Corporation

*Life and Debt

(about IMF practices with an example of what happened in Jamaica)
*Bring back my father (Vandana shiva campaign for the farmers in India)

*Outfoxed

(all about Fox News)

*why we fight

(well the name explains all)

friday

well it is friday and for the next couple of weeks no visit to D :( and unlike the usual friday "yayyy" it has been more friday "crap".. part of the reason is the god forsaken seminar series we have every friday... keep telling myself not to attend but usually end up getting tricked for a nice talk or sometimes for food. Toady was one of those moments (again) when right after some talk you feel dumb,,, like shit,,, wondering more if my last six and half (not seven) years could have been better spent doing something else......

Interesting read

I came across this interview with Peter Higgs (of the legendary Higgs Boson) and it was very interesting to note that he mainly credits his theory to Phillip Anderson. Infact to here are some interesting snippets from this article

"Once more help arrived from the condensed-matter community when, in 1963, Phil Anderson pointed out that the equivalent of a Goldstone boson in a superconductor could become massive due to its electromagnetic interactions. But did Anderson's argument apply in the relativistic case? No, said a paper by Walter Gilbert in an issue of Physical Review Letters that arrived in Edinburgh the middle of July. Yes, said Higgs, after thinking about it over the weekend."

and here is an quote from Higgs

""Anderson should have done basically the two things that I did," says Higgs. "He should have shown the flaw in the Goldstone theorem, and he should have produced a simple relativistic model to show it happened. However, whenever I give a lecture on the so-called Higgs mechanism I start off with Anderson, who really got it right, but nobody understood him."

You can read the complete article

here

Well it is friday had a couple of interesting seminars which I attended to but it is one of those day where after the talk you do feel a bit dumb/frustrated. On the good note atleast it made me go back and read about Kondo effect. In most pure metals the resistance is supposed to go down as temperature. It has the usual t power 2 and 5 dependence with an addition phonon contribution. In certain impure metals (impurity being magnetic) however the resistance shoots up at some region. This was first observed in 30s and I think a few decades later Jun Kondo explained it. Simplifying the work of Kondo we could explain the data by adding a log{1/T} dependense. This should give rise to a divergent term at T approches 0 but I guess Kondo effect only comes it for a particular region.It is one of interesting and the very first example of asymptotic freedom discovered in nature. I guess much earlier than the same description was applied to strong forces in elementary particles. Its odd than Jun Kondo has not been awarded Nobel proze yet.... For a good reading on Kondo effect there is a good article

here

Good one

"The intrepid reporting of award eligible journalist Sean Hannity" I laughed so hard