Our new paper has just been published in Physical Review Letters : Surface X-Ray Speckles: Coherent Surface Diffraction from Au(001).

This is just wonderful news. I’ll write more later about it, but for now I’m just giddy.

... as measured by human contact.

The world seems a bit smaller today. Which, while not quite as much the world traveler as Kerri is, I have lived in some pretty different places. Something very odd happened when I was looking at Stephen Hawking’s webpage a few days ago. Something I really didn’t expect.

I noticed a name that struck me as... unusual, Chamblin. When I was very young (5-8ish) I had a friend whose last name was Chamblin. I’ve not seen him in let’s say at least 25 years. However, it’s not a name I’ve seen spelled that way anywhere else and I suppose for some reason when I saw it written it struck me as kind of odd. So there it is on the Cambridge University website along with Stephen Hawking.

Now, the little neurons in my head (overworked and deficient to be sure) probably would not have made any connection were it not for something I’d heard uttered while I believe I was an undergraduate. I remember my mother saying that, “do you remember your friend? His older brother has gone on to study mathematics in England.”

Mathematics, England, and Chamblin... that statement hit enough things in my head while looking at Hawking’s publications to wonder, could it possibly be that this Chamblin and my friend could be related(or even his brother)? I shelved the thought last week as I got busy with some other work, but it’s come back into my consciousness a few more times since then. Today I had the thought while sitting at a computer and looking for something else to do while one of my programs finished running.

The story, at least the start of it, is that in fact the Andrew Chamblin, theoretical physicist and Andrew Chamblin, older brother to my friend, were one in the same. I say “were” because tragically he passed away 3 years ago.

It is a very odd feeling... Amarillo TX is a pretty small town, especially when one considers the mentality of many of the people there. I’d more or less assumed that I’d been about the only person to leave Amarillo for a career as an academic/research physicist, at least during my own years. What’s more is as soon as I’d made the connection that indeed there was someone else that had come from the same place, going out into the wide-wide-world doing physics, that the connection was broken. For the shortest moment I knew that there was someone that would be really fun to contact. Someone perhaps to meet if we overlapped on a holiday visit some winter. Someone that had traveled the same road out of Amarillo and into the world of physics.

It’s actually not the same road and I’m being a little too liberal with my nostalgia. Andrew Chamblin excelled early in school and showed a bright future very early on. I on the other-hand experienced a terrible education by the same school district, gaining the distinction of “mentally retarded” during the 2nd grade and having it follow me through high-school. Andrew Chamblin went to Rice, then Oxford, and then Cambridge directly from Amarillo after high school. My high-school guidance councilor recommended that I “find a good trade school,” and there was some mention that I could make a decent plumber. My path to physics was a bit circuitous. Hmmm.... I’ll be nice and say I took the scenic route. It was only after attending community college that I found people that inspired me to do well (and even since, throughout the years, my academic path has been somewhat unusual).

What is more is that I may well have seen Andrew Chamblin during my adult life, perhaps passing him in a hallway though without realizing our common geographical origin. In fact, had I not decided to switch from theoretical physics to experimental condensed matter physics I almost certainly would’ve met him (again). He collaborated with several of the theorists at the University of Washington while I was a graduate student there.

This has been a rather unusual half an hour.

I only have only a couple sets of memories of Andrew Chamblin. Even then they’re not of him as “Andrew Chamblin”, but only the older brother of my friend. There’s nothing insightful to my memories, just typical things of kids growing up, one from a birthday party and one of running down an alley.

I’ve not spoken to my friend nor anyone from his family in years. I’m not even sure if he’d remember me. However, I think it’s worth tracking him down just to see where this goes.

It is time for me to begin my search for a faculty position in earnest. I’d actually prefer not to discuss many of the details of this process and will not be disclosing much of that information. In fact, I find much of the information to be rather inappropriate to publicly talk about.

However, there is something that I’ve noticed that I would like to expand upon that I was not expecting explicitly at the outset. Part of the process of applying for faculty positions involves preparing statements of teaching philosophy and research intent. It’s this preparation that has struck me in a rather interesting fashion, in a way that actually reminds me of my physics qualifying exam experience.

It may seem trivial to write down a “statement of research intent” or “teaching philosophy.” However, in practice this has been quite a project and resembles very much the process I go through for writing academic papers and proposals. My own approach to writing papers often boils down to an organic ``growing” of the paper. First, I tend to try to write down the principle idea/result to convey. Then I write everything I can think of that might possibly be important, details and all. This causes the manuscript to balloon to a length usually much to large to be suitable, and to be fair, many of the details included in the first draft are not sufficiently important to be included. At that point I begin to cut down the manuscript into something smaller. Each time asking if a paragraph or sentence is really needed. Eventually I end up with a shorter, more to the point paper that is suitable to submit for publication. This also describes the process I’ve been using to create my own application package for these faculty positions.

It has actually been rather enjoyable to write all these things down and edit the thoughts into a coherent whole. It’s also rather interesting in that much of the information are about subjects that I feel rather strongly about. The whole process has been very beneficial in providing sort of a unified vision of what I want to do. What are all the parts? What do they have to do with each other? How do they work together?

It’s that unification that reminds me of my qualifying exam. The purpose of that exam should* be for the students to study enough physics over a singular period of time to develop a unified ``world view” and approach to physics. That approach may be very different from how others do physics (and often is), but the important thing is to have one and to have a enough physics in your head at once to see the similarities across many different fields of physics (a unified vision). This idea may be a bit idealistic when it comes to students actually taking the exam. But to me taking the exam is not the important thing, preparing for it is. That is where the benefit comes from.

After spending quite a bit of time on my application package, it feels like a similar unification has taken place. It’s a feeling that now more than ever before I know what I want to do with my career and life in science.

We’ve just gotten word that one of our papers has been accepted to Physical Review Letters. The preprint is available here on the arXiv servers : cond-mat : 0909.2273. The paper deals with our work on studying the surface reconstruction of gold using coherent scattering techniques.

The short story is that we’re able to get access to how quickly the microstate (the microscopic configuration and profile of the surface) is evolving even when the average properties of the surface are not changing. We’ve been able to collect speckled scattering patterns and, by comparing how fast the speckles evolve, determine some new information about the surface dynamics. This was principally a demonstration experiment that happened to have some nice results along with it. We’re now working to extend this technique to a few new samples and system combinations.

Surprisingly I did not have my usual multi-hour fight with the arXiv server either. Usually it takes countless attempts, anger, meditation, bribery, and some things I should not admit in order to get through the automated paper submission process. But for some reason this time it happened without a hitch.

One of the fun things about papers is creating the figures. Well, sometimes it is fun, and sometimes it is tedium. However, the results are sometimes quite nice. The little thing above is a ray-tracing example or ``cartoon” of the two different surface orientations of a hexagonal arrangement over the square facet of a face centered cubic arrangement.

Actually, that’s a nice way to begin to explain the header graphic for the blog (at least the current one). If you notice the two hexagons are offset from each other by a rotation of 30 degrees (it’s actually a 90 deg rotation, but 30, 90, 150, etc... are all the same. That is called symmetry, but it takes too much digression for the moment). Each hexagon has 6 corners. Though for our purpose, it’s better to think of each hexagon as having 6 possible orientations. But since there are two was of laying the hexagons down over the squares, you get 12 total possible orientations. These orientations can all be made to satisfy a diffraction condition.

The graphic below is an example (albeit a computer generated one) of what such a diffraction patter would look like.

There’s a bright region in the center, but let’s ignore that for a moment. Instead, count the number of bright spots going around in a large circle. There are 12, one for each of the possible orientations. To be fair, this picture is as if we are diffracting photons through the sample, instead of off of the sample (we reflect them).

Today we brought home a new tropical fish, a Clown Loach that is roughly 8-9inches in length. She is the SUPER LOACH. She is the new queen of the tank. She’s also somewhat mesmerizing to watch, kind of like the “hypno-toad.”

We’ve added her to our loach tank with 14 smaller clowns roughly 2-5 inches in length and they seem very happy to have the giant among them. Nightly we observe a “loach jam” where most all the loaches in the tank choose to cram and stuff themselves around their new queen, regardless of where she chooses to stay the night. It’s really quite amusing to look at the tank with a flashlight after the lights are out and see loach heads and loach tails all sticking out from a single place.

I’ll try to get a picture of her posted eventually.

This is our new boss, at least the new boss of our mbuna cichlid tank.

He is a Hongi fish, more specifically a “Super Red Top Zebra Hongi.” Whatever his name, he is the king of our buna.

I sometimes play with a big band in the northwest Chicago Suburbs. Think of me as the second or third “chair” for rhythm guitar. Anyhow, they’re putting up a new website and requested short music bios from everyone. When I started writing one up, I couldn’t help but make smart-ass comments about myself. Quickly it just turned into a complete joke that is included below. I went back eventually and put together a good one for them to use. However, I figured the “original” should be preserved. So here it is, my music bio :


Michael Pierce, Guitar

Michael Pierce is not a professional musician and never should be. Despite attempting to learn the guitar from an early age, his development was slowed by an interest in rather poor "music." During his late teens he grudgingly admitted that jazz was in fact cool and began playing in small combos. After high-school he enrolled at the University of North Texas to study music. The music world is thankful that he promptly dropped out without ever completing a single music class at UNT. Today his sound can best be described as "howling cats" and may in fact be a criminal offense in several states. By some miracle he is capable of providing a steady rhythm and a couple of chords. He is currently working hard to learn a third chord, but this is hampered by his inability to properly fret any notes. In order to spare the audience, the rest of the rhythm section will unplug his amplifier prior to any performance. Thankfully he is unaware of this trick and utterly incapable of reading this text.

I have become, understandably, cautious when exiting the APS. Tonight was no exception. I made lots of noise on my way out to my car and looked very carefully for my attacker from the previous night. Yet there was no sign of him and I made it to the car... However, as I pulled out of the parking lot, there he sat on the path I had just walked. He waited a second, watching me (as I stared in horror). He then turned and hopped off back into the grass.

In all likelihood the little guy has probably taken up residence in one of the drain pipe holes or somewhere around that exit to the building. Perhaps being a bit nocturnal he comes out to investigate and chase off anyone that ventures too close to his new lair.

Injury to insult... or something. One of my colleagues said, “You know it’s just not your day when...”

After a very disappointing day, on my way out the door for home I was assaulted. Yes, assaulted by this little critter :

Sigh...


I leave the building and it’s quite dark. While walking across the grass I hear a “rustling” in the brush off to one side. When I turn to look I see what appears at first to be a crazy raccoon. The little guy was running straight towards me. “What an odd behavior for a raccoon, usually they run away.” I thought.... Once he closed within 10 yards I began to get nervous. Once he got within 5 yards I realized this was no mere raccoon. He was in fact a skunk. With no hiss or bark or warning he hopped around and pointed his backside at me. I started to run, but not before he got a “volley” off. I, a fully grown man, a scientist with a PhD in physics, ran in terror screaming “SKKKKUNNNNNKKKKKKKKK” into the night. Thankfully I was only lightly grazed and alone with my shame. However, it was a long ride home... often with the windows down.

So, to cap off a rotten day I got sprayed by a skunk. That’s not how I intended the experiment to go. No where in the proposal did we request a skunk. No where in the safety write up did it mention assault by skunk. In fact, I’m not sure there is even an MSDS for “skunk.” How careless...

I figured the cats would go crazy at home, but in fact they we only mildly curious. I did however get to sleep alone on the couch with nary even a cat.

Yes, it’s been a while, a few months as a matter of fact. Part of it is certainly my nature drifting between different things. But part of it, and much of the barrier to keeping up the website has been problems with my software. After losing all the entries (and painfully restoring them) a few times, I gave up on things for a while. It’s rather discouraging to record entries and keep things up to date when the software (cough, ahem... Rapidweaver) decides to periodically destroy all the previous entries. Things did not work as intended after the software upgrade. So the solution was to recreate the site from scratch and block copying entries in one by one. The other impediment was of course answering the question of whether or not to continue using this software. For better or worse, it’s what I know so the easiest thing seemed to be sticking with it a while longer.

Ranting aside, I was reminded today by some friends as well as my wife that things needed a face-lift.

For the time being, please bear with me as I recover and restore the website. For now I’ll leave you with a picture of Buckley. This evening he discovered an open guitar case and with his natural attraction towards guitars, he was right at home.

Our paper, "CO-Induced Lifting of Au(001) Surface Reconstruction " has finally been published! It is in Journal of Physical Chemistry C as a letter and I am very happy about it. The article is the first one listed on that page, complete with a nice graphic that all the letters are allowed to include. This was quite a process, longer than I'd hoped, but it's done. However, I'm not aware of any of my papers ever being "quick" or "easy." It never seems to be so easy as "just writing up what we've found," making a figure or two and sending it off for someone to publish.

Remember the idea of a doppelganger? An evil twin, look-a-like?

I recently (through an act of vanity) typed "Michael S. Pierce" into Google. Many of the results were not surprising. I, the real me, showed up quite often. However, the 4th hit was profoundly disturbing. Apparently some there's a registered sex offender that has stolen my name. I'm not sure why that's so upsetting, but it is. Even merely the association by name only with such a person (and act) is something I find disturbing. Plus I never want to have to explain, "no, no... that's the OTHER Michael Scott Pierce."

I don't care that he's older than me. By becoming a sex offender he lost all legal rights to the good name.

Removing my middle initial from the search request removes me entirely from the first few pages of results. sigh... At least it's not filled with 12 dozen pages of sex offender hits.

It has been interesting to see what has returned to me musically in the past week and what is more slowly developing.

One the whole, things associated with my head seem to be coming back much quicker than I thought they would while physical things appear to be returning at a much slower rate. For instance, coordination of my hands, speed of clean notes, sight reading, implicit and explicit memory of songs and progressions all are returning very fast. I've already started trying to play what would be considered somewhat challenging material. On the other-hand, finger strength and calluses are quite slow. Not having properly "prepared" fingers can make quite a few things either painful or impossible to play. I really like to bend notes, at least I used to. Many large but simple chords (typically requiring a finger bar) are difficult to play without accidently muting at least 1 or 2 strings.

It's also interesting that I'd had a large resurgence in listening to "good" music. It's something that I used to really enjoy, but in the past several years my ears had just packed up and left. It would seem that they've also returned and are happy with the change.

I did something bad yesterday.... very very bad. I picked up a guitar again.

Actually it started a few months ago. Through all these years I've kept my old steel string acoustic. At times it would go a year without being touched. The strings, a decade old by this point, were dull and dead and caked with dust. But regardless, I began to play it again. The past week had seen a particularly large increase in both frequency and duration of playing. However, it wasn't until we went for thanksgiving that I truly got hooked again. There I had access to a new, cared for, lively instrument. From that point on there was no turning back.

I'll admit to having crazy thoughts of the inverse of 12 years ago. At that point I decided to quit UNT and music in favor of something else (to be fair, class hadn't even started yet and I never really got moved to Denton). That something else led me to science, to physics, and to where I am today. Now I'm having thoughts (though not serious ones!) of the perfect, idyllic life of a jazz musician (let me know if you ever run across someone that has it). I could just pack everything up, quit science and start being "cool" again. sigh... being a post-doc will do that to you at times.

Anyhow, let me introduce our newest member to the family : a Paul Reed Smith 2000 McCarty guitar, complete with an amber finish and bird inlayed neck.
This is the kind of guitar I dreamed about having while I was a kid. Kerri has named the guitar Sufie after a bird.

I've been a bit busy with things at the lab since we returned from our road trip last month. Many things have been unattended, and while I've actually written a few entries for the blog, they've never actually been posted. So kind readers (both of you), please excuse a few back dated posts.

We've been trying to wrap up our experiments with gold surfaces, at least to the point of having a good story worth writing. It's there, we just need a little extra work to have it all tied together nicely. There's usually some question of where to draw the line and write up your results. It would always be better to have and know more about what you're studying, but it also would never get published. The reverse of writing up every little step of progress is also to be avoided. In the words of Pliny the Elder, "...do what is worth being written, and write what is worth being read." (or something to that affect).

So we have decided on exactly what we need to put in our current paper and are attempting just such an experiment. The really exciting thing is that we've figured out a way to do it in our own lab! We have a rotating anode x-ray source set up with a full 4-circle diffractometer. Normally this is used to test things out before running at the synchrotron and provides us a nice way to characterize our sample quality ahead of time. However despite this being a very bright rotating anode source, it is still dismally dim compared to the synchrotron (ballpark, let's say a million times less photons). It also is essentially only capable of making a handful of different photon energies and changing between the energies requires a few days of effort.

But, let's say you already know almost everything you need to know. AND you've figured out exactly what you want to study, knowing exactly where you should find it. At the beamline this could be done with a scan that takes... let's say a minute. While synchrotron time is expensive, rare, and better used for other things, we can run our own dim x-ray source as long as we wish. So, that 1 minute stretches to an hour, which stretches to days, and ultimately let's say a week. That puts us at a factor of 1/10 the signal we could get during one of our beamline experiments and is entirely within acceptable limits!

We tested it this weekend and were successful at seeing the signal on a test sample! So at this point we need to get a good sample in the our beam. I prepared a sample all weekend and then tragedy struck this morning. While making the final adjustments before putting the sample in the experiment, I shattered the quartz and dropped the sample. Gold single crystals have a consistency very similar to butter. The fall from a few feet was enough to obliterate my precious (golum!). So, sadly, I'm preparing a new sample. Hopefully we can try tomorrow to start the experiment here.

Once we've done this, we're fairly confident that we can write up our results well enough. We've also been doing some very different experiments that confirm what we've already seen. It's certainly nice to have the extra proof, we're hoping to extend this in a new direction not previously possible. The new experiments involve a great deal of vacuum work. Instead of x-ray diffraction and scanning microscopy, I've been trying electron diffraction and photo-electron spectroscopy! Both are quite nice and deserve a bit of explanation, though I'm afraid that will have to wait a bit. However, you can see an example of the electron diffraction in the titlebar-mosaic above. It's the first picture on the far left.

I'll be on the night shift for the coming beamrun. I've begun trying to stay up late in order to make the shift early. Usually it's not too difficult for me if done over several days, a few hours at a time. But for the moment I'm really dragging.

Working nights is a mixed bag. It's actually not so difficult aside from the unpleasant shift in sleep and being away from Kerri so much. Depending on how you're feeling it can also dull your wits off and on. But in terms of working, things are often very quiet on the night shift and it can be a great time to get things done. With so few interruptions it's easy to concentrate on the job at hand.

One odd thing about working nights (for me at least) is that inevitably within a few days I will lose track of which day is which. I can count the number of times I've been at work and can count from there to figure out which morning it is. But in terms of intuitively knowing which day of the week it is, I no longer know. It's a little disconcerting and unnatural. However, all this does give me the chance to see a few of the original Star Trek episodes that only seem to come on TV between 4am and 6am.

For Memorial Day we took a short trip to visit FermiLab in the nearby western suburbs of Chicago. Like Argonne, Fermilab is a Department of Energy laboratory and employs a large number of dedicated scientists. However, they do very different science from what goes on at Argonne. Fermilab primarily focuses on high energy particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. It is (at least for a tiny bit longer) the best particle accelerator in the world. Many of the most important experimental (and some theoretical!) discoveries in particle physics have been made at Fermilab. This is very different science from what I'm used to. The subject is far smaller, the energies much higher, and the number of people involved is much larger!

The building in the picture is Wilson hall where I believe most of the offices are. The main collider ring runs around just to the left of the picture. From our own vantage point on the ground it's just a long row of dirt (the ring is buried underground) that has a slight curvature to it. The experimental halls are at different locations around the lab.

During my time as a graduate student in Seattle, I knew several professors and students that worked on projects at Fermilab. Seeing certain experimental halls that until this time were just acronyms put a nice face to the names. By seeing them, things like MINOS, CDF, D0, all became more real and not just something that I've heard or read about. It's really exciting stuff.



A decent portion of the lab is open to the public and I highly recommend going if you every get the chance. Even without a guide it can be a great experience. One word of advice would be to visit their website and print up some maps and descriptions before you get there!

Aside from the exciting science that goes on and the humbling experience of being in the place where it happens, there's a large amount of wild-life to see. I think the most famous animal residents have to be the bison. The lab keeps a small herd of them quite comfortable. Argonne has its white-deer, and Fermi has its bison. It's spring right now and the herd has at last 4 babies that we saw.

There are also a large number of birds. Kerri enjoys them to no end, including this little guy(her first blue bird of the year). We found a single tree that hosted 3 Cormorants, 1 Heron, and 1 Egret at the same time. Those are all quite large birds, and all seemingly content enough with each other not to care. Kerri had a bird sighting first on this trip finding a Bobolink. Peregrine Falcon's have also been spotted nesting, or at least attempting to nest, on the main building.

During our previous trip we saw a muskrat bringing nesting material and/or food into his little burrow. He would travel back and forth between the burrow and his favorite pieces of tall grass. Each time he'd chew off several large stalks and pull them back through the water. Once the busy little guy caught wind of us he headed under the water and stayed hidden. We checked for him this time, but he was apparently safe and snug in the burrow.