‪ New paper: We combine computation and synthesis to design and discover intercalated layered hybrid perovskites with tunable structures and optoelectronic properties. With Julia Payne | Grateful to @leverhulme.ac.uk for funding. @physastrostand.bsky.social #2DPerovskites

New tool to identify ‘toxic’ green books Developed by @physastrostand.bsky.social and the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museum, the new device is transforming how cultural heritage institutions identify toxic pigments in historic books. Read more 👇 ow.ly/WAil50Wflrf #EverToExcel

Are you interested in Rydberg physics, but in solid state? Come and join my brilliant colleague’s group in Durham, Prof Matthew Jones for a postdoc! @durhamqlm.bsky.social

New paper: a novel microcavity fabrication technique using birefringent 2D perovskites, enabling asymmetric topological polariton states without geometric structuring. With Pavlos Savvidis | Grateful to @leverhulme.ac.uk for funding. #Polaritons #TopologicalPhotonics #2DPerovskites

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

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ChatGPT’s response to my grant rejection frustration: “allow yourself space to feel the disappointment properly. You don’t need to move straight to silver linings. This is part of the emotional cost of doing high-risk, high-reward research—and it’s ok to feel knocked by it.” pretty good I thought.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

I highly recommend listening to Sean Carrol’s @seanmcarroll.bsky.social podcast with Francoise Collet on deep learning and intelligence if you’d like to understand why LLM has nothing to do with intelligence, and why it never reach AGI. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/s...

We have the stable genius’s formula: max(trade deficit / total export / 2, 10) www.theverge.com/news/642620/...

Should we give Google another 21 years to add the option of “sort by number of citations” in Google Scholar?

I had made Microsoft Quantum aware of issues before publication of this latest Nature paper (which uses it tune up their devices). Since they seem to not care, I have make these issues public. In short: The topological gap protocol and all claims based on it are flawed. arxiv.org/abs/2502.19560