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Interactions: Ed Simpson and the 3d nuclide chart

Posted by Zoe Budrikis | Categories:

Interactions: Ed Simpson and the 3d nuclide chart

The nuclide chart is a staple of nuclear physics, visualizing the properties of nuclides arranged by their number of protons and neutrons. The chart appears in text books, talk slides and Lego™ form (in the Binding Blocks science outreach programme). The 3D Nuclide Chart is a web app put together by Ed Simpson (@SuperSubatomic on Twitter) of the Australian National University. The app lets users plot the nuclear data of their choosing (taken from published data tables), play around with the 3D viewpoint (or work in 2D), set colour schemes and fonts, and then export the visualization as a png file or export the relevant data. The results are rather pretty, and the app is easy to use.  Read more

Interactions: Chen Fang and the Materiae database

Posted by Zoe Budrikis | Categories: ,

Interactions: Chen Fang and the Materiae database

In theory, many ordinary materials can have exotic topological phases. But how can we find them? In 2018 a research group from the National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics in Beijing scanned 39519 materials to predict which phases of the already-known compounds might exhibit topological properties. These materials were summarised into an interactive database Materiae, where you can browse compounds containing particular elements, check if they have any topological phases and visualise their band structure.  Read more

Interactions: Luke Fleet

Posted by Iulia Georgescu | Categories: ,

Interactions: Luke Fleet

Luke Fleet is a Senior Editor & Team Leader at Nature. He joined Nature Research in 2013 as an editor at Nature Communications, before moving to Nature Physics in 2014, and then to Nature in 2017. He’s responsible for selecting the research papers that are published across a range of fields, including applied physics and electronics, and also assists in devising and delivering the goals for the physics team.  Read more

Interactions: Conversation with Martijn van Calmthout

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Interactions: Conversation with Martijn van Calmthout

The theoretical physicist Sam Goudsmit had a remarkable life. Not only did he discover the electron spin with his colleague George Uhlenbeck (for which they did not receive the Nobel prize – to the surprise of many colleagues), he was also the scientific leader of the Alsos mission, the United States mission searching for the ‘German nuclear bomb’. After the war, in 1958, he launched the pioneering weekly Physical Review Letters, which became one of the top publications in science.  Read more

Interactions: Iulia Georgescu

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Interactions: Iulia Georgescu

Iulia Georgescu is the Chief Editor of Nature Reviews Physics. Previously, she was an editor of Nature Physics, where she managed to sneak in three original “Alice in wonderland” illustrations (1, 2, 3) and the self-declared best cover-line ever.  Read more