Laverbread and Cockles

Gower on Britain's Favourite View




Laver is highly nutritious because of its high proportions of protein, iron, and especially iodine. It also contains high levels of vitamins B2, A, D, C and contains significant amounts of taurine. It is made from seaweed which is boiled for several hours. The gelatinous paste that results is then mined and rolled in oatmeal, fried and eaten with cockles for breakfast.


The source of the seaweed used to make laverbread was historically the Gower coastline. There are still small producers of Gower laverbread (Welsh: BARA LAWNR), but most commercial laverbread is now made from seaweed gathered from western Scotland. In addition to Wales, laverbread is eaten across the Bristol Channel in North Devon, especially around the Exmoor coast around Lynmouth and Combe Martin.

Phase Transitions in Graphene

Dreaming about graphene is a beautiful thing. The leptons become light and dark excitons. Suspending graphene makes the top and bottom surfaces indistinguishable. You can even invert its handedness. Time reversal symmetry makes single layer graphene almost perfect. But bilayer is great, too. A magnetic field can be applied to change the phase of the excitons in a bilayer, half-filled system to that of a Bose Einstein condensate. When current flows in opposite directions in the two layers, the resistance goes to zero. An oddly quantized vortex binding one zero mode per valley is present, though slightly split due to a mixing of the valleys in the graphene layers. You can also have a phase transition from this coherent excitonic phase to a pair of single-layer fractional Quantum Hall States as a function of layer spacing. There is always something new to read about graphene as one drifts off to sleep.

Listening to Good Music

Listening to good music is important to good nutrition, just like water, sunlight, etc. My favorite singer is Katherine Jenkins. If she is good, where are her fans I am asked.

Here is the answer: United Kingdom 58.53% (59.62%); United States 11.21% (10.95%); Australia 3.14% (3.18%); France 2.60% (2.79%); Netherlands 2.19% (2.07%); Japan 1.26% (1.35%); Germany 1.17% (1.18%); Ireland 1.07% (1.13%); New Zealand 1.00% (1.03%); Canada 0.97% (1.01%). The numbers in paratheses are the previous percentages. Her popularity will continue to rise in the U.S. and probably in France and the Netherlands. In New Zealand, she has to compete with Yulia MacLean, who brings everyone to tears.

Unlike other singers who are popular because of the songs they sing, the songs that Katherine and Yulia sing become popular because they sing them. Some people who think they are tone deaf and don't like music and religion can't help loving Hallelujah after Katherine sings it.

Fine Structure Constant from Graphene

Pi divided by the fraction of light transmitted through a single layer of graphene gives the reciprocal of the fine structure constant.

1. de Broglie wavelength of slow neutrons----------------137.03601082

2. AC Josephson effect in superconductor junction--------137.059770

3. Quantum Hall effect-----------------------------------137.0360037

4. Anomalous magnetic moment of electron---------------137.03599976

5. Anomalous magnetic moment of positron---------------137.03599976

6. Muonium atom----------------------------------------137.0359940

7. Helium spectrum--------------------------------------137.035853

8. Velocity of hydrogen 1s electron /velocity of light-------137.0388

(All values were obtained from book called "Hydrogen" published by Harvard University Press in 2002 by John S. Rigden)

Definition of the Meter

The latest in a long line of ways to determine the length of a meter is based on mode-locked femtosecond lasers and an optical frequency comb technique. A Nobel Prize was awarded in 2005 for this work.

Quantum Computers from Graphene

Researchers at the University of Leeds are looking for new ways to construct quantum computers using graphene.

The image below is an image of a magnetic field created by d-wave superconductivity.

There are various ways of creating the necessary double degeneracy for encoding a qubit.

D-wave superconductivity is being studied by IBM in thallium-copper-oxide high-temperature superconductors, as well as, in graphene. Below is a method of creating two Josephson junctions in single layer graphene. A gate voltage is used to tune either of the junctions to a pi phase. This pi phase regime implements the qubit.

In another variant, a d-wave Josephson junction could be tuned to create the doubly degenerate ground states. Other variants have also been by proposed by Guido Burkard's team at the University of Konstanz and others.

DNA Sequencing using Graphene

Artist's impression of a DNA molecule (helix) moving through a tiny slit in a graphene sheet (shown in blue). (Courtesy: Henk Postma).

Henk Postma at California State University Northridge has proposed a way of sequencing an entire DNA strand without the need for blasting or computer processing (arXiv:0810.3035v1 ).

Entangled Degrees of Freedom

Lepton pairs have degrees of freedom which are entangled or not.


Image copyright © Anton Zeilinger, Institute of Experimental Physics, University of Vienna.
Photon pairs are entangled in the illustration above.

Entangled particles fly apart in opposite directions.

Attempts are made to entangle the various degrees of freedom of various types of laser beams.

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The language seems sort of funny when you think of particles as brades. It seems natural they should get entangled. Nevertheless, it is really a degree of freedom that gets entangled between two entities like laser beams, allotropes, atoms, etc.

Gravity

The search for gravity goes on. With the Hadron supercollider shutdown till spring, the Higgs mechanism is in hibernation. The graviton is even more elusive. Is it hiding in the Klein Gordon Propagator and Spin Connections in Tangled Qubits populating the valleys of Spacetime?