Dear Diary,
This morning's
plenary speaker from UC Davis gave an incredible talk about how frustration is
minimized in protein folding. If you didn't have such a principle, then
you'd have to solve something like 10^600 scenarios. Unfortunately,
there are some diseases (like prion's disease) where you get
thermodynamically unlucky and build harmful beta tissue in your brain. I
overheard after that someone actually knew of one of these cases but
the doctors had a hard time explaining why this was occurring; it was
nice to see that physics put their mind at ease.
I
bothered the speaker afterward by saying hi for Justin (he was a student of his). A friend of
mine interested in biophysics also cornered the speaker to ask about the
program. I took notes on the speaker's presentations so I can share it with the group when I get back.
The next talk was an overview of novel
effects in type II superconductors and topological states by a professor
from Stanford. Apparently, a graduate student in the lab tried to
propose to his girlfriend by writing an "S" by dragging the
superconducting vortices around with an atomic force microscope's tip
covered in a magnetic material. Before he did so, he went to a
conference and got some harsh comments because it looked too much like
the number "5", and to make things worse, his proposal was not
successful! But he salvaged the situation by changing it to "SU" in
dedication to the university. Apparently research can affect your
personal life!
The speaker was looking to see if you can
find fractional vortices and concluded that you can't (i.e. whether the flux quantization's charge is 2e or not e--that is the question). I asked her if
she'd looked at these effects near the critical temperature where
pairing was weaker--she did on the under-doped side of the dome. Then I went to lunch with her and another
physicist and we talked all about superconductors and how a high Hirsch-index can be found with them! Yay!
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