So, you want to do science, uh? (Rants to Young Scientists Part I: Citations)

Sometimes, I wish someone had made that statement and followed with some advice, real world advice. I mean, Medawar's "Advice to a young scientist" was great in convincing me science was about inquiry, patience and common sense —the well-known adage of  1% inspiration and 99% perspiration— but, after a few years into the academia, I wished someone had told me about the dark side of research: citation engineering, steering and hiding just to mention some examples. I mean, all these lay inside the gray area between ethical and unethical behavior and a simple search brings up discussion forums on the topic in all the scientific communities from social to natural sciences.

I guess, right now, it is my frustration talking: I have seen a couple of recently published articles related to our late work that doesn't even bother to cite us even when we have introduced some basic concepts or techniques on the topic, our manuscript was published at a major journal and, also, a simple scholar search brings out our papers on the top of the list.

I'm curious about the motivation behind these practices. Discarding those cases when there's truly no knowledge about the previous work and results have been re-derived from the start — t happens, believe me—, I can imagine that some guys are so worried about fame and recognition, that they try to bring their work and only their work into the playground to increase the visibility of their papers above similar results from other groups. Some other guys may wish to engineer their metrics by increasing the citations to this or that paper, even in cases unrelated to the matter at hand, in order to fulfill requierements of evaluation agencies. Or maybe I'm completely wrong and don't understand the motivations behind us, human beings. 

So, you want to do science, right? Well, it's the best job you will have if you are into it. It's not as logical, ethical and "pure" as you would expect. Shit happens even in the ivory tower of academia but the good things is that the nice ethical guys are more than those in the gray side of the ethical/moral spectrum. The best part is: it depends on you to keep it that way. Cite, cite truthful, cite well. Sometimes your superior will have the last word —been there— just don't go down without raising the point, that will get you an explanation about how it is not unethical or amoral engineering or steering citations —it's up to you to buy it or not, I didn't—.

Our latest paper: The exact solution of generalized Dicke models via Susskind–Glogower operators

Our latest paper The exact solution of generalized Dicke models via Susskind–Glogower operators  has been published a day ago in J. Phys. A: Math. and Theor.  The Dicke Hamiltonian is a workhorse of Quantum Optics, it describes the interaction of a collection of identical two-level systems with a single mode electromagnetic field under the long wave and rotating wave approximations. Surely, you will be thinking: "well, that model conserves the total number of excitations and parity; then, it's trivial to find its proper values and states." Well, it is trivial to solve the system but, as far as I know, it's not that trivial to follow the dynamics of a large ensemble under this model. 

Actually, I was looking at recent solution to a nonlinear version of this model via the Bethe ansatz method and  I got frustrated that even by using this method it was hard to follow the dynamics of a qubit ensemble of size twenty. So, Héctor and I sat down and applied a right unitary method that we had used to follow the dynamics of a quantum Landau-Zener-Majorana Hamiltonian a few months ago. It was trivial to extend the approach from a single qubit to an ensemble but the solution was not elegant enough, as you can see in the first part of the latest paper. So, we tried an alternative, instead of thinking about transformations we just thought about algebraic manipulation of the Hamiltonian at hand. After a few tries, we realized that one particular arrangement allowed us to write the evolution operator as the transform operators acting on the evolution operator of a tridiagonal matrix in the ensemble basis that depended only on the number operator. From there, it was all downhill because calculating the evolution operator of such a semi-classical-like Hamiltonian is quite simple, numerically, even for very large matrices and applying the transform operators on the initial states was easier than applying them on the time evolution operator. 

At the time when we were writting the paper, I only had my dual-core i7 laptop with 8GB of RAM, but it only took a few hours to follow the dynamics of an ensemble consisting of twenty-five qubits interacting with a coherent field with as mean photon number of twenty five. Now, I have done some simulations in my eight-core i7 desktop with 64GB RAM and I can follow the dynamics of a hundred qubits overnight with a very inefficient program. I'm hoping hat I will be able to simulate four or five hundred qubits interacting with large coherent fields as soon as I have time to sit down to think about this problem again.

Oh, I forgot to tell you. Once we obtained a result for just the Dicke model we extended the approach to include independent nonlinearities in the field and the ensemble, an approach a little bit more general than that of the guys in the Bethe ansatz method.

So, I hope you like our approach, use it and cite us in the future. You can find the Journal version at JPAMG. If you don't have access, we have prepared a manuscript with the final published version but without the journal format and uploaded it to the arXiv.

Last weekend movies (6th week of 2013)

It was a hell of a week but I managed to watch a movie in pieces,

1. The Man with the Iron Fists, *
   The one star is because I liked martial art movies back in the 80s. The music is good but not right into the asian fighting movie mood, I think. Well, I just didn't feel it. 

I'm on the mood of some real asian epic movies, just like Chibi, which I don't remember watching the second part. I need to go to Asia sometime soon to recharge my epic martial arts film batteries.

Last weekend movies (5th week of 2013)

It's time to try to catch up with so many movies that I have missed. I'm gonna try my best to watch at least one per week, 

1. Looper, ****
   I think I will become a fan of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He's a good actor and it seems like he's all around good guy. Now, I really don't get it why the future mafia takes such big troubles to dispose of enemies and has no trouble at murdering a wife. Anyway, the stars are for a nice story, where I can see and feel many loopholes, with an awesome ending. Truth be told, I don't like everyone lives happily forever endings. I rather have a good masterpiece novel ending where sacrifices have to be done. Such is life.

So, any suggestions?

Sorry, we're open!

Hello world,

I have decided to come back online to seek catharsis. You see, I have been recently appointed Investigador Titular A at the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE). I am a newbie to the rat race of tenure track positions so I did the most stupid thing I could have thought about: Start developing old ideas, trying to collaborate with well established researchers, get a couple of students and, basically, try to publish or perish... Bad idea.

Why, would you ask. Well, it happens that I am also getting married next May.

In short, I have put myself in the most crazy situation I have ever put myself into in my life. Now, I am co-responsible for two doctoral students, teaching a graduate class, trying to publish some papers, searching for a good idea to write a grant due to the end of February, taking care of a friend's house, traveling to and fro for wedding matters, and screwing up things now and then.

For example, I just realized I got an awful typo in the last equations of our latest prepint! I completely forgot to type the interaction terms! 

Sooooo...

It's time to keep doing what I have done all this time, Prepare lectures a week ahead, try to finish projects well ahead of deadlines, and add some rules like fixing a precise hour for meetings with the doctoral students and working at most with two research projects at a time. Also, I need to let go and that's why I'm back.

Sorry, we're open!