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Hamish Johnston

I am an online editor of Physics World. I did a PhD in condensed-matter physics at McMaster University in Canada. I am still fascinated by what is an extremely rich and varied subject that I believe is ignored by the media (Physics World excepted, of course). As a result, I’m happiest when I’m blogging about topological insulators, the latest quasiparticle or some other quirk of condensed matter. So, if you spot something weird and wonderful in solid-state physics, please get in touch. In my spare time I am a Scout leader.

Author archive

The four horsemen

The four horsemen

This is a slide from a talk given by David Bader of Lawrence Livermore on behalf of Brian Soden of the University of Miami...

Weathering the storm

Weathering the storm

"You can flood a city, but you can't drown a university", says Greg Seab, a physicist at the University of New Orleans who was speaking at a press conference on the impact of Katrina on local physics departments.

Happy Birthday, PRL

Happy Birthday, PRL

That’s some cake! Yesterday evening my IOP Publishing colleagues and I managed to blag our way into a posh reception celebrating 50 years of the journal Physical Review Letters. I forgot to take my camera, so the photo is courtesy of James Riordon at the APS. And yes, we did sing: Happy birthday Physical Review […]

A new spin on silicon and graphene

A new spin on silicon and graphene

At last year’s March Meeting in Denver, Ian Appelbaum gave a ten-minute talk about how he had injected spin-polarized electrons into a piece of silicon, transported them micrometres and then detected a spin-polarized current at the other end. It was just one of thousands of talks given that year. But then Appelbaum published his results […]

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