My Physics Journey
My Physics Journey - on the road to becoming a professional physicist
I know, a bit cliche, but I’m not a writer, so I hope you’ll forgive the obvious title. My name is Eric Stimpson, and I’m a relatively new graduate student in physics at Wayne State University. The purpose of this blog is to document my journey to becoming a professional physicist. I hope that what I share here will be helpful to those who come after me on their own journeys.
I anticipate writing a variety of articles, many of them fairly technical and specific to my area of research. This, in fact, is the primary reason I’m here, and building this blog. It occurs to me that as much as I appreciate the guidance and insights that my advisor has to offer, his skill set and experience are vastly different than mine. How much does he really remember what it was like trying to learn a new area of research? And how much would that even help if he did, given the degree to which a research field evolves over time.
Starting research feels a bit like trying to get aboard a moving train. Each car of the train is a potential topic that you might want to pursue, but as the train speeds by you wonder where you might begin. The train is already quite long, with potentially hundreds or thousands of published papers, and trying to figure out where to grab hold and hoist yourself up is daunting. At least this is how it feels to me.
I recently passed the PhD qualifying exam (January, 2024), the latest significant hurdle to beginning my career as a physicist. Before taking the exam, I already knew who my advisor was going to be, but my research training didn’t begin until May, just a few weeks ago. I will be doing research in a field known as phase-field crystals or PFC, and much or perhaps most of what I write about will be directly related to this field for at least the next few years. My sense is that PFC has a fairly small number of researchers compared to other areas of physics, but I’ll talk a lot more about PFC in the weeks and months to come. For now, I’ll offer only the briefest of descriptions.
PFC is a model that describes how particular condensed matter systems evolve over time. These systems are typically crystalline, although there are PFC researchers working in soft matter, glasses, and even macroscopic active matter. For now, I’ll be focusing on PFC as it relates to 2D materials like graphene, hBN, CSi, and the newly discovered goldene. PFC is only one cog in a pantheon of experimental and theoretical methods employed to study these materials. It is a simulation technique, not unlike density functional theory (DFT) or molecular dynamics (MD), but it serves a distinct purpose, namely PFC can be used to predict structure.
Meet ‘goldene’: this gilded cousin of graphene is also one atom thick (nature.com){ data-preview }
As I said, I’ll have a lot more to say about PFC as it relates to what I’ve learned so far, but far more significantly as I learn more over the next few years. So, I’ll leave it here for the moment as I get back to work on more pressing tasks. In my next few posts, I plan to give a brief overview of the programming involved in PFC and some of the mathematics that is involved. Until then, cheers!
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