Description of the Blog

What is this blog?

Basically, it's a place for me to store summaries of physics research articles I've read.

My filing cabinet is arranged alphabetically by author's last name. This makes it hard to track down articles if I only remember the subject or the title. By storing a summary and my comments on the Web, it will be much easier for me to track down an article, and I can spend less time worrying about my filing system.

I'm a graduate student at Penn right now. In my effort to learn about current developments in physics, I print out and read anywhere from 3-7 articles from the Physical Review Letters each week. I also read a lot of the News and Views pieces from Nature, and some longer articles from Physical Review B and Reviews of Modern Physics. Often, I dig into the archives of these journals to read classic papers or to follow up on the references from other papers I've read.

If I read a paper and find it interesting or useful enough to put into my filing cabinet instead of my ever-growing pile of scrap paper, I'll post a summary here. As a result, this blog will probably be updated a few times a week. It's likely that I'll go off on tangents as I'm writing my summaries, so think of this as more a journal than any kind of reputable academic resource.

Although this blog is designed to meet my own needs, others might find it interesting or useful as well. I welcome and encourage any comments, feedback, and discussion, as well as references to related articles and other suggested readings on relevant topics.