Abstract: Spatially resolved current/conductance vs. voltage characteristics measured with the scanning tunneling microscope provide surface electron density of states information that is essential for understanding the electronic behavior of the surface under study.  Localized scattering centers such as those associated with adsorbed atoms, ligand attachments along molecular wires in self assembled monolayers, and color centers in polar materials can result in both elastic and inelastic resonance signatures in the I-V observations that are intriguingly sensitive to the details of the local environment that could be provided by a nanoscale confinement.  Some useful consequences of this will be developed theoretically for three examples which are of experimental relevance in STS:  i) Kondo atom mirages in quantum corrals; ii) idealized atom switches in adsorbed molecular layers; iii) phonon broadened defect resonances in ionic films.  The complimentary roles of analytic modeling and numerically intensive computation will be discussed.

I went to CMU with Bin for Andrea J. Liu's talk on "Jamming" yesterday. She is a female professor from UPenn. She showed us her calculation of the critical role of "J point" in her 3D jamming phase diagram and borrowed the "K-core Percolation" Theory as possible explanation. It's not so much fun as I thought it would be but still good to learn. And It is a pleasure to walk back to Pitt in the fine afternoon. Her abstract and a few selected papers are listed below just in case...