This post is an excerpt from the formally non-public part of my DFG Heisenberg grant final report (about half of the actually interesting part). I hope it will help people do better. Some personal information has been redacted. The backstory In 2018, when I first submitted a Heisenberg program proposal, funding was declined. One referee report was full of misinformation and misinterpretations, the…
"A magic dwells in each beginning" / "Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne" - this famous line of the poem "Stufen", written by Hermann Hesse over 80 years ago, comes to my mind when posting a bittersweet update here. After over 16 years of independent research and teaching at the physics department of Universität Regensburg, my Heisenberg grant and with that my last university employment…
„Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne“ – an diese berühmte Zeile aus dem Gedicht „Stufen“, von Hermann Hesse vor über 80 Jahren verfasst, muß ich denken, wenn ich hier ein bittersüßes Update poste. Nach über 16 Jahren unabhängiger Forschung und Lehre an der Fakultät Physik der Universität Regensburg läuft meine Heisenberg-Stelle und damit mein letzter befristeter Hochschulvertrag aus. Zu den…
Recently I've been experimenting with Catalyst , the tool that generates stages and iso files for Gentoo's Release Engineering team . The first, still very experimental result is now available for download - a bootable hard disk image in QEmu's qcow2 format that immediately drops you into a fully working Gentoo environment. Feel free to download it and try it out, either this first upload or any…
If you work in research, nowadays you can be sure to get swamped with "conference invitation" e-mails. A large part of these is, in effect, spam - attempts to get you (or your funders) to pay for meetings of highly questionable scientific worth. So, let's introduce a rating scale for scientific (or not) conferences, from 0 to 10. All examples have really happened. 0 - Trash You ask a friend who is…
The GNU C Library ================= The GNU C Library version 2.40 is now available. The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel. The GNU C Library is primarily designed to be a portable and high performance C library. It follows all relevant standards including ISO C11 and POSIX.1-2017. It is…
I've recently posted about the requirement of a German tax id for all reimbursements even of foreign seminar guests, or more precisely, about my frustration thereof. In the meantime I've been talking to colleagues, our faculty administration, read up some legalese texts, and last but not least contacted friends induced in the relevant higher Bavarian mysteries for their opinion and knowledge. The…
[Update at end] I've been working in university research now for quite some time, and one of the great things about it is international cooperation. The sciences live and breathe via cooperation visits, seminar invitations, ... One of the fixtures at probably nearly every university is the faculty colloquium, where each week, covering a wide range of topics, a renowned expert is invited to speak.…
While everyone is busy analyzing the highly complex technical details of the recently discovered xz-utils compromise that is currently rocking the internet, it is worth looking at the underlying non-technical problems that make such a compromise possible. A very good write-up can be found on the blog of Rob Mensching ... " A Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects "
Following a lot of smaller and larger improvements and additions , we have finally released Lab::Measurement 3.900 on CPAN. Highlights compared to the last "round version" include support for the Nanonis Tramea quantum transport measurement, the Zurich Instruments HDAWG arbitrary waveform generator, the Synktek MCL1-540 lock-in amplifier, the Bluefors dilution refrigerator temperature control, the…
Molybdenum disulfide MoS 2 is often discussed as a groundbreaking material for electronics applications. As bulk crystal or as 2D layer material similar to graphene, it is an excellent semiconductor with strong spin-orbit interaction. At strong doping it even becomes intrinsically superconducting, with possibly interesting topological properties. So how about using MoS 2 for quantum electronics,…
The video recording of the Walter Schottky Prize award ceremony in June is finally online. Enjoy :)
So I'm a good, and normally very happy booking.com customer (Genius Level 3 if that means anything), and have spent a lot of money over the past years via that company. This year, during this trip, I tried booking airport pick-up in advance for the first time. The first pick-up failed spectacularly, and I'm still dealing with it. Long flight(s). Frankfurt (FRA) - Bangkok (BKK), Bangkok (BKK) -…
If you want to test the Gentoo LiveGUI, but don't feel like cutting short the precious uptime of your machine, here's a handy bash script for testing the iso files with qemu: #!/bin/bash qemu-system-x86_64 -m 4G \ -enable-kvm \ -cpu host \ -smp 4 \ -name "Gentoo amd64 LiveGUI" \ --netdev user,id = vmnic,hostname = gentoovm \ -device e1000,netdev = vmnic \ -bios /usr/share/edk2-ovmf/OVMF_CODE.fd \…
After a long break, we now have again a weekly LiveGUI ISO image for amd64 available! The 4.7 GB download, suitable for DVD burning or an USB stick, boots directly into KDE Plasma and comes with a ton of up-to-date software. This ranges from office applicactions such as LibreOffice, Inkscape, and Gimp all the way to many system administrator tools. Now, we need your help! Let’s make this the…
After a long break, we finally have up-to-date Gentoo stages for the MIPS architecture available for download again! The weekly builds cover at the moment for 32-bit mips2 and mips32, for 64-bit mips3 and mips64 in o32, n32, and n64 ABI - and all that for both big and little endian. Should be good as a start for just about every hardware out there. For more information on MIPS, see the Gentoo MIPS…
You may have noticed additional Stage 3 links marked with "desktop profile" on the Gentoo downloads page recently. So what's this about? The only difference between a "normal" Stage 3 file and a "desktop profile" Stage 3 file is that the latter has a desktop profile selected (surprise!). As example, if a "normal" amd64 (x86-64) systemd stage uses as profile setting default/linux/amd64/17.1/systemd…
IMPORTANT : This blog post is outdated! As direct result of this experiment, we now have official Gentoo binary packages available . See the announcement for more information and further links! The old blog text follows... As an experiment, I've started assembling a simple binary package hosting mechanism for Gentoo. Right now this comes with some serious limitations and should not be used for…
Since the text was becoming more and more outdated and also more and more convoluted, I have completely reworked the "Preparing the disks" section of the Gentoo AMD64 handbook . Since fdisk supports GUID partition tables (GPT) for a long time now, references to parted have been dropped. The text restricts itself now to the combinations 1) UEFI boot and GPT and 2) BIOS / legacy boot and MBR. While…
With the help of our infrastructure team, I've finally managed to integrate the riscv stage builds with our signing and mirroring system. So now we have a riscv tab on the installation media download page , and the mirrors carry weekly signed stage3 archives for riscv64-lp64d and riscv64-lp64 , in both openrc and systemd variants. Using the same build infrastructure based on qemu , there are now…
The last weeks have brought excellent news in more than one way. First of all, it's now official that I'll return to University of Regensburg starting 1 March 2021 with a Heisenberg grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) . Named for the physics Nobel laureate and co-founder of quantum mechanics (and Maximilianeum scholarship recipient ) Werner Heisenberg , this is the most renowned DFG…
The second-lowest vibration mode of carbon nanotubes is the so-called longitudinal or stretching mode; here the vibrational direction is along the axis of the carbon nanotube. The vibration frequency f and with it the harmonic oscillator quantum h f is already much higher than for the transversal motion; it scales with the length L of the vibrating nanotube segment as 1/ L , and is for 100nm < L <…
After the top position in the Nature Index 2019 and repeated great rankings in physics in the DFG Förderatlas ( 2012 , 2018 ), there's another excellent news for Regensburg. In the so-called Humboldt-Ranking 2020, listing where most of the foreign scholars with an Alexander von Humbold foundation scholarship go to pursue their research in Germany, Regensburg is at position 1 of the natural…
I finally got around to updating the experimental riscv stages. You can find the result on our webserver . All stages use the rv64gc instruction set; there is a multilib stage with both lp64 and lp64d support, and there are non-multilib stages for both lp64 and lp64d ABI. Please test, and report bugs if anything doesn't work. As for the technical details, the stages are built using qemu-user on a…