Last time I talked about the fate of Anderson localization when the disorder fluctuates in time. This time I will talk about another localization problem, of  a particular class of random matrices. The mathematical model I will describe in the following can be used to describe various physical problems: the localization of phonons in a [...]

Significant advances in laboratory techniques in tailoring and processing materials at the atomic level have resulted in nanotechnology becoming an increasingly mature field. One of the exciting goals of nanotechnology is the design of powerful nano-machines, i.e. functional entities at the nano-scale that work like macro-world machines. A simple nano-machine would be an entity that [...]

I am very happy to find myself writing a blog about a recent paper written by Jose Juan Blanco-Pillado, Alex Vilenkin and myself, and titled “Quantum tunneling in flux compactifications“. In this paper we studied bubble nucleation rates in a 6-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory. The two extra dimensions are compactified into a 2-sphere, and their radius [...]

I always find quite exciting when fundamental (and sometime abstract) results of pure mathematics and quantum field theory can be directly related to condensed matter or statistical mechanics problems with a clear physical interpretation and motivation. For instance, in our recent paper on “Clustering properties, Jack polynomials and unitary conformal field theories” (arXiv:0904.3702), we study [...]