March 08 Issue - Employee Monthly Magazine
Lab researcher leaves his mark among the greats
The handwriting’s on the wall
Alexander Balatsky of
Condensed Matter and
Statistical Physics. Photo by Dixon Wolf
It's not often a researcher is remembered in the
presence of Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, Ernest O. Lawrence, Max Planck, John
von Neumann, or other titans of science who have
left their mark on human understanding during the
past century. Along with their mark on physics, these
scientists literally left their mark on a wall—the wall of
Leiden University.
Condensed-matter theorist Alexander Balatsky recently
joined a handful of Los Alamos researchers who have
had the privilege of signing their names alongside
signatures of preeminent scientists who have given
colloquia at the Lorentz Institute at Leiden University
in the Netherlands.
"It is quite an honor to speak at the Institute," Balatsky
said. "The colloquia was started by Austrian physicist
Paul Ehrenfest back in 1912, when he joined the
Leiden faculty, and is very highly ranked in Europe."
The Colloquium Ehrenfestii transformed into regular
public lectures on theoretical physics in 1921. The
university has drawn presentations on the leading
edge of physics ever since. To commemorate each
talk, presenters are invited to sign a wall at the Institute.
After the Institute was rebuilt in the 1960s, the
original wall, which contains signatures of Einstein
and similar luminaries, was retained and incorporated
at the Institute’s present location. Los Alamos researchers
Kevin Bedell and Wojciech Zurek are among more
recent signers.
In the tradition of colloquium founder Ehrenfest,
speakers are asked to present their subject matter so
anyone in attendance can easily understand it. To do
so was not such an easy task for Balatsky, who was
refining ideas about how certain types of crystals don't
necessarily transform from one state to another—such
as from an electrically conducting state to an electrically
resistive one—in a smooth, homogeneous fashion.
His research into this inhomogeneity was part of a
recently published paper in Nature that helped view a
Mott metal-insulator transition in a vanadium crystal,
something that had never been witnessed before.
"As I was preparing my talk, I attended a banquet held
in the cafeteria, and I noticed that some of the faculty
members were, you know, looking at me. It was kind
of like they were thinking, 'Well, we will see how
good a speaker he is.'" Balatsky said. "Of course, I
could not eat very much, as the pressure was on."
Some time later, during the questions and discussion
that followed the colloquium, several people came up
to Balatsky and said they enjoyed his talk very much.
"I didn't see anyone out in the halls laughing, so I
guess I did okay," he said with signature good humor.
"Then Jan Zaanen, the organizer, comes over with
this very fancy screwdriver and leads me to the wall,"
Balatsky recalls. "They have glass over the wall, and
the glass is held in place with these special screws. He
removed the glass, I signed the wall, and he put the
glass back up. Even though it happened very quickly,
one has a sense of touching something important...
a piece of science history."
- James E. Rickman
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