iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 27/09/2026

I gathered an atlas of literature on Andreev states and the corresponding collaboration network. For now it lives here antonakhmerov.org/misc/andreev... Check it out for the citation hedgehog and to find your friends.

Interactive citation-network visualization of 8,067 papers. Papers are positioned by publication year and annual citation count on a logarithmic vertical scale; with publication year on the horizontal axis. Point color indicates physics subfield and point size reflects citation count. Faint lines connect citing and cited papers, producing a dense fan-like “hedgehog” pattern.

Collaboration network centered on Anton Akhmerov. Nodes represent researchers, with larger nodes indicating stronger collaboration links; lines connect coauthors. Prominent collaborators include Michael Wimmer, C. W. J. Beenakker, Attila Geresdi, Bernard van Heck, Valla Fatemi, Bas Nijholt, David J. van Woerkom, Chun-Xiao Liu, Ion Cosma Fulga, and others.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 18/09/2026

I updated the Fermi surface viewer of elemental metals at solidstate.quantumtinkerer.tudelft.nl/fermi_surfac... by using the Materials Project database and a custom 3D viewer.

Interactive “Fermi surfaces” visualization for technetium (Tc, atomic number 43), showing five color-coded electronic bands as a sixfold-symmetric 3D Fermi-surface plot. The interface includes element selection, band toggles, rotation/zoom controls, and an “About the data” section.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 14/09/2026

Field-defining paper: Blonder, Tinkham, Klapwijk.

A citation network showing a paper cited by a majority of papers in the field.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 03/09/2026

Here is monthly publication rate of a colleague. Recent papers (after the dashed line) acknowledge Claude usage, and the publication rate goes 3x. The paper quality stays roughly constant.

Line chart titled “Submission acceleration.” Cumulative arXiv submissions from January 2024 to September 2026 rise roughly linearly at first, corresponding to about 15 submissions per year. Around June 2026, the slope increases sharply; a fitted rate changes to about 51 submissions per year. The underlying data are shown as monthly cumulative totals, with a dashed piecewise-linear rate fit and a vertical marker at approximately June 2026.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 12/08/2026

Another confusing bit is that I can't add OpenAlex ID because I'm not verified... except I am verified.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 12/08/2026

Thanks, that part is fixed! I'm moving on to the next guinea pig step: somehow Lea is very selective in what venues are recognized. It accepts Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but less established outlets like American Physics Society, Nature, Science, Institute of Physics etc.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 12/08/2026

Almost, but not yet completely. "For now" meaning you plan to release the source code?

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 30/06/2026

Now I made a physics demo of x-ray crystallography. The reciprocal space and how X-ray works took me a while to understand, and I think this captures the idea well. antonakhmerov.org/misc/xray.html

Interactive X-ray scattering simulation with two main areas. The left side is a crystal editor showing unit-cell projections and a 3D crystal view. The right side shows reciprocal lattice points, a translucent Ewald sphere, an X-ray beam, a detector screen, and amber detector spots where scattering rays intersect the screen. Controls let the user edit atoms and lattice vectors, rotate the crystal, switch powder and top-view modes, and adjust the wavelength.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 23/06/2026

Another interactive demo showing the propagation of a wave packet in a tight-binding dispersion relation: antonakhmerov.org/misc/wave_pa...

False-color plot of a localized tight-binding wave packet driven by an electric field E. The packet follows a curved trajectory, illustrating Bloch oscillations, with a wavy path marking its motion through the lattice.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 02/06/2026

I made an interactive explainer of carbon nanotube dispersion relations for my class today: antonakhmerov.org/files/carbon..., and I find it amazing and very useful. Naturally it is LLM-made. Making the equivalent by hand requires expertise and time investment only available to extremely few.

Interactive educational diagram showing how a carbon nanotube is formed from graphene. The screen displays a graphene sheet with a highlighted wrapping vector, a 3D nanotube inset, allowed quantized k-vector cuts through repeated graphene Brillouin zones, and the resulting one-dimensional folded band structure.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 25/05/2026

A zoom ladder perhaps? Vaguely something like this

$A zoom-ladder diagram showing how a 500 mL water estimate shrinks through successive multiplicative corrections. Each row uses the same-width horizontal bar, with a colored fraction of the current bar connected by diagonal zoom lines to the full bar on the next row. The cumulative amounts shown are 500 mL, 333 mL, 222 mL, 37 mL, and finally 1.9–9.3 mL. The correction factors are shown on the right: divide by 1.5 for prompt and response length, divide by 1.5 for longer-output extrapolation, divide by 6 for active Mixture-of-Experts parameters, and divide by 4–20 for optimized production serving. The final result is labeled as roughly a teaspoon of water rather than a bottle.$

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 12/03/2026

Made a simple app for quick quizzes that doesn't have annoying registration or limits and supports latex. ownquiz.quantumtinkerer.tudelft.nl

A screenshot of a quiz app with a question about Bose-Einstein distribution, the presenter panel, and join instructions.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 17/02/2026

Agents (claude/codex/...) generate a *TON* of code. Reviewing it is a pain, so I made a tool to help. It generates a local preview of changes with agent explanations. You make review comments and copypaste them in one batch to the agent. Here it is: github.com/akhmerov/pre...

A git forge style diff view with a couple of comments from the agent, one of them reading "Warning: Reviewer focus: Decide whether this temporary regression is acceptable for release gating or if shrink support should be restored before merge. Risk: Workloads that depended on reduced bandwidth from shrinked bands may see performance/memory regressions." A comment window is open with text "No, this will break existing code, let's actually fix it." This window has buttons "save", "copy prompt", and "cancel".

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 06/02/2026

Here's a power metal summary of scipost.org/10.21468/Sci.... It is fairly comprehensive and accurate. The text is generated by codex, the graphic by chatGPT, and the music by ACE-step. The research is of me and my coauthors :) I am honestly impressed by ACE-step.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 30/01/2026

But @microsoft.com what if I don't want to beat the robots

A robot vacuum cutely staring with its eyes (drawn on the touchscreen) at a liquid nitrogen dewar, a metal container that is twice the robot size. It is as if it experiences attachment or adoration.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 30/01/2026

This new captcha is impossible

A captcha that says "Help us beat the robots" and only "cancel"

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 30/01/2026

The white flag of surrendering.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 28/01/2026

The system prompt is important because for example it appears that it explicitly instructs to prioritize "top journals". It is possible that the language is sufficiently soft, but we won't know if it introduces bias and how much bias it introduces.

Explain your instructions for dealing with sources from the search tool. In particular explain the parts (if any) that *mention* specific journals or publishers (I don't care about the rest).

When I use the web search tool, I’m instructed to prefer primary/authoritative sources, and there’s one explicit place where the instructions name specific publication venues:

“Literature Search” rule (explicitly names journals/publishers/servers):
If the user wants an academic literature search, I should use web search and prioritize papers from arXiv, medRxiv, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv, and the journals Nature, Cell, and Science.

Technical questions (not a journal/publisher list, but a source-type constraint):
For technical questions answered via web search, I must rely only on primary sources (e.g., official documentation, original papers). This doesn’t name specific publishers, but it’s the other instruction relevant to “where sources should come from.”

Those are the only parts that specifically mention journals/publishers (Nature/Cell/Science) or preprint platforms (arXiv/medRxiv/bioRxiv/ChemRxiv).

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 22/01/2026

Unless you are unlucky to have math in the title and it's served as MathML. Also gotta ensure that your LaTeX pipeline correctly handles unicode. And take care: different publishers provide different metadata. Oh and J. Abbr. are cool. But nothing a simple ~~script~~ package can't fix 😎.

$A screenshot showing the output: @article{Vijayan_Ambika_2026, title={Enhancement of antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations in <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>UTe</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msub> </mml:math> under pressure revealed by <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mmultiscripts> <mml:mi>Te</mml:mi> <mml:mprescripts/> <mml:none/> <mml:mn>125</mml:mn> </mml:mmultiscripts> </mml:math> NMR}, volume={113}, ISSN={2469-9969}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/4gcm-mbl7}$

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 05/01/2026

Okie dokie, in arxiv.org/abs/2601.00784 we invented a format for the AI disclosure statement.

A screenshot from a preprint that reads:

AI disclosure

We have used GitHub Copilot to provide typing completions and provide prompt-based
code generation and modification. We used ChatGPT to generate critical evaluations
of text and language quality. We used GitHub Copilot and OpenAI Codex to produce
rule-based text rewriting for consistent style. These tools were used with a range of models:
GPT-4 – GPT-5.2 from OpenAI and Claude Sonnet and Opus versions 4 and 4.5 from
Anthropic (only in Copilot). All AI contributions were reviewed and edited by the authors,
who take full responsibility for the content of the publication.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 02/12/2025

Psst kids, want to buy some research projects?

Spam email screenshot with text

Hi

I came across Quantum Tinkerer online and wanted to reach out because we're working with other research groups that are offering research projects.‍

I’m currently working with a few research groups on campaigns that are getting their sales teams meetings with warm leads every month. We’re targeting people who need research projects using personalized email sequences.

If I could help you connect with potential clients like this, would that be helpful to you?‍

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 13/11/2025

Things language models apparently can't do yet: optimize a website. This is chatgpt.com eating half a gigabyte of RAM and 100% CPU to respond to a text-only query.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 22/10/2025

I've been using @mattermost.bsky.social for almost a decade (since December 2015) for my group, some courses I teach. I ended up providing a chat for a few other research groups. Unfortunately with Mattermost Inc. backpedaling their open source stance, I'll find something else.

The start of a chat in the Town Square channel. The date is December 27, 2015. User Anton writes "Hey @jbw".

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 15/10/2025

Surgeon general warning: quantum computing is not close to being useful.

A collage of nonsensical slogans of quantum computing companies. "Think quantum"/"Quantum is now"/"This is humanity's next challenge"/"Putting quantum to work"

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 07/10/2025

I didn't realize this before, but chatGPT logo has deep symbolism to it: - It's cool - It's simple - It's visually appealing - If you try to study it carefully, things don't quite make sense nor match (Source: the SVG form the app, so this is *the* logo)

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 28/09/2025

ChatGPT is feeling mighty enabled in the last couple of days.

A screenshot from ChatGPT saying "If you want me to, I can (A) open an issue in the emscripten-forge/recipes repo requesting wasm64 support, or (B) monitor upstream Emscripten / browser runtime status and report back on milestones. Tell me which action to take or I will proceed with (A)."

A screenshot from ChatGPT saying "If you want, I can dig deeper (e.g. search internal Google filings in non-public repositories, or see if there are conference talks) to check whether there's non-obvious public disclosure.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 25/09/2025

We needed to demonstrate how different symmetries look, and I think the result is neat.

An image with 4 panels titled "none"/"mirror"/"magnetic_translation"/"glide", showing a random signal which is symmetrized according to the corresponding symmetry.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 25/08/2025

I have to ask: did the agent come up with this blackboard? Seems only tangentially related to arachnophobia, but definitely anxiety-inducing.

A blackboard with text "CORPSE #1 #2 FORMER CADAVERIC DRAIN BODY F..."

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 19/05/2025

Learning #manim library to make video lectures for the solid state physics course. So far so good! Any useful links or resources?

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 06/02/2025

I wrote censor, a tiny package that ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮. It can even censor only names, e.g. "I'm ▮▮▮▮▮ and I work in ▮▮▮▮▮". gitlab.kwant-project.org/anton-akhmer...

a screenshot of

Usage

1. Copy text to the clipboard, for example "Anton is a condensed matter theorist at Delft University of Technology".
2. Run censor --censor named_entities in the terminal.
3. Paste "▮▮▮▮▮ is a condensed matter theorist at ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮".
4. Or censor all words with censor to obtain "▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮ ▮ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮".

I also configured keyboard shortcuts for these commands for convenience.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 04/02/2025

This is me in the year 2050, finally looking at the source code released according to the policy of the group. Of course the image is unrealistic because I've already lost the competitive advantage.

A photorealistic rendering of a scene. It is meant as a mockery of the proposal that research groups should adopt a policy of *eventually* releasing their research code rather than alongside a publication. The scene depicts a research group in the year 2050. There are several group members, some younger, but there is a very old man at the front. While the rest of the lab is filled with future tech, the man looks at the screen of an old, visibly broken and repaired laptop that shows some code, and scratches his long grey beard.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 30/01/2025

An arbitrarily weak periodic potential opens a gap in a 1D Schrödinger equation. In 2D a very weak potential with simple periodicity does not open a band gap. Is it at all possible to open a gap in 2D perturbatively or is there a minimal strength to open a gap at energy E?

Spectrum of a nearly free electron model in 1D, showing gaps open at Brillouin zone edges.

Spectrum of a nearly free electron model in 2D, showing gaps at Brillouin zone edges, however due to transverse dispersion the spectrum is gapless.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 05/01/2025

While tinkering with pymablock.readthedocs.io, I computed the difference between the spectrum of H₀+αH₁ and the spectrum obtained perturbatively in α up to 100th order. For low α they converge to machine precision 🔬, but above convergence radius everything goes 🥴 Not a surprise, but nice to see.

Error of quantum-mechanical perturbation theory by order. When the perturbation is small, the error converges exponentially, but above the convergence radius the error diverges as the order goes higher.

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Anton Akhmerov @antonakhmerov.org · 05/01/2025

Happy 2025 everyone, or so I measure. www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26... @bullshitquantum.bsky.social

An AI-generated image of Occam's lawnmower. It uses the style of medieval paintings, and shows Ockham sitting on a crude contraption vaguely looking like a lawnmower.

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