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Jesse Berezovsky

@jesseberezovsky.bsky.social
406 followers 213 following 534 posts

Physics professor @ CWRU. Experimental quantum materials, magnetism, and applications of stat mech to music theory and composition.

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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 19h
1. Schrodinger equation. End of list.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Another one that breaks the rule of being a historical paper, but I think is pretty interesting is this one about how the Aharonov-Bohm effect can be explained via electric or magnetic fields, despite the usual claim that it can only be explained via electric or magnetic potentials.
journals.aps.org
Role of potentials in the Aharonov-Bohm effect
There is a consensus today that the the main lesson of the Aharonov-Bohm effect is that a picture of electromagnetism based on the local action of the field strengths is not possible in quantum mechan...
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Another one is Mott's paper explaining how particle tracks can appear from a spherical wave: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspa/article...
royalsocietypublishing.org
The wave mechanics of ∝-Ray tracks
Abstract. The present note is suggested by a recent paper by Prof. Darwin,* and is intended to show how one of the most typically particle-like properties
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Another example is the use of a Klein-Gordon-like equation instead of the Dirac equation. Here is a paper by Feynman and Gell-Mann where they point out that the two are equivalent, and put the K-G form to use.
journals.aps.org
Theory of the Fermi Interaction
The representation of Fermi particles by two-component Pauli spinors satisfying a second order differential equation and the suggestion that in $\ensuremath{\beta}$ decay these spinors act without gra...
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
the 1920s by people such as Schrodinger, Dirac, and Gordon explaining the Compton effect using wave mechanics. Here is a modern treatment:
iopscience.iop.org
The Compton effect-Schrodinger's treatment
The Compton effect-Schrodinger's treatment, J Strnad
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I had this thought when thinking about how to present the Compton effect to my Modern Physics class. People tend to say that there is no way to explain the change in light frequency unless you consider light to be a particle. But then a bit of searching turned up a number of papers from
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
When the light switch in the room is flipped the hammer is automatically activated, completely demolishing the sculpture. It was the artist’s job to render their art in this final flattened form. This is how a quantum computer works.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Imagine an art installation where the artist works in a pitch black room to construct an incredibly ornate sculpture out of fine metal filigree. But this sculpture is not the finished piece. Right above the sculpture hovers a giant hydraulic hammer. 🧪⚛️
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
It would be cool to put together an annotated bibliography of Modern Physics apocrypha. Anyone want to collaborate?
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
So what to do? I feel like I have to teach the dogma because it is the standard material everyone is supposed to know. But I also want to offer glimpses of the interesting apocryphal writings that offer a different perspective.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Then over time the nuance was deemed too complicated for pedagogical purposes (maybe reasonably). But then because that is all everyone is learning, we take the dogma as gospel and forget that all those other interesting ideas are still out there.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
But then if you look back at what the founders of quantum mechanics and relativity were saying in the early days, you can find all the apocrypha. They knew there remained some ambiguity and nuance and wrote about it.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Scientists do a thing called “measuring position” and it causes the wave function to collapse to a delta function! And don’t ever say the words “relativistic mass” or the ghost of Einstein will come for you!
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Like, the ultraviolet catastrophe, photoelectric effect, and Compton scattering can only be explained by thinking of light as a particle! People thought the Klein-Gordon equation might work to describe relativistic electrons, but it didn’t so we have to use the Dirac equation!
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Teaching Modern Physics this semester and increasingly feeling like in physics there is this dogma that has been canonized over the years that we teach the students. But if you know where to look, you can find the apocryphal texts. 🧪⚛️
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
in configuration space. So why bother with the existence of the pilot wave at all (which evolves as it does for no reason), and instead just jump right to the particles whose distribution evolves as it does for no reason.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Yes, maybe I understand. In any theory, at the bottom there is postulated behavior that occurs for no known reason. E.g. the Bohmian pilot wave evolves according to the S.E. (or any equivalent formalism). Why? It just does. Then this pilot wave pushes around a distribution of particles...
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I feel like the final graphene example is more of an example in which the field does not exist. Here, the nonrelativistic electrons happen to mimic the equations of relativistic QM, so we can use the Dirac eq as a mathematical model.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
and say that the probability distribution just updates *for no stated reason* but happens to do so in accordance with the Schrödinger eq. Is this accurate?
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This thread is maybe starting to illuminate this idea for me. It seems quite similar to Bohmian mechanics but instead of viewing a probability distribution as being guided by a pilot wave as described by the Schrödinger eq, we just do away with the mechanistic description of the guiding…
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
And my wife was like "I'm a little worried about what he's watching on YouTube - he's getting ads for sex changes or something."
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I don't really consume any media with political ads, but my 12-yr-old is getting them non-stop, and he is pretty enraged by the GOP tactics.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Ooh, nice. More detailed than mine. Perhaps I'll show this one too. (Though I also like to emphasize which areas underlie others).
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Just made this animated map of physics to show my Modern Physics class tomorrow. Am I missing anything important? 🧪⚛️
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
My (vague) understanding is that due to the tendency towards uniformity, you don't get sharp boundaries between regions. Instead the value changes gradually, but the topological defects can't be removed and so shrink down to form vortices, whose cores trace out the 1d strings.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Doesn't that give you a network of cosmic strings? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_...
en.wikipedia.org
Cosmic string - Wikipedia
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Yes, exactly this.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Just mentioned this paper to my modern physics class. We were talking about how complex numbers are useful for things with the symmetry of rotation in a plane, so I briefly mentioned quaternions and octonions, and so on... Hopefully I didn't get it too wrong...
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
We’re covering this exact topic in the modern physics class I am teaching today - passed along the link to the students. Very timely! (And yes, I used the same pun in my message to the class).
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
It seems a bit fishy to claim that one is testing a particular formulation vs the others to which it is mathematically equivalent.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Sorry for your loss.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
But I think the “observed values” could be anything, such as labels on the dial of a measurement device so complex numbers are fine.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
It seems to me the important thing is to specify an orthonormal basis (which could be encoded as the eigenvectors of a normal operator). If you also want the eigenvalues to encode associated “observed values” that represent classical physical quantities, then they need to be real.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Here's the Mach-Zehnder interferometer with the interference pattern in the background.
Laboratory setup of mirrors and beamsplitters forming a Mach-Zehnder interference, and the resulting interference pattern on a card.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Editing a paper and I wanted to include an image of optical interference I had found on the web, but the editors said it would be too hard to get permission. So I spent an hour or so in the lab and made my own. Fun to do something in the lab every once in a while. ⚛️🧪
Red laser spot showing vertical interference fringes.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
My kids loved the Beethoven’s Wig albums (and I did too). They are clever and educational both in terms of music recognition and about the styles or composers. The kids look like geniuses now when they hear something and they’re like “ah, Schubert’s trout!”
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
And my mechanical/digital clock is finished! Here it is hanging in my kitchen. The digits are made from turned maple and walnut, and the face is birch plywood. The cam-driven mechanism is shown below.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Is there a consideration of avoiding redundancy? That is, IF pure Everettianism could explain all empirical observations, then it wouldn’t seem right to add more to the theory to explain it all again.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
And weird that the plant is mostly made of air.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
I just read the section in the Feynman lectures on this like two days ago, and was also wondering if there was any new clarity in the intervening years. www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_28.html
feynmanlectures.caltech.edu
The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. II Ch. 28: Electromagnetic Mass
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
I was wondering about that when I saw the headline. I found this very detailed post enlightening. While lateral sizes are still 10s of nm, the engineering involved does seem very impressive. morethanmoore.substack.com/p/ibms-annou...
morethanmoore.substack.com
IBM’s Announces 0.7nm Process Node, Introduces NanoStack
666 Million Transistors Per Square Millimeter
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
I imagine this guy will be getting a big x-lab grant.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
I don’t generally push the like button, but your paintings are fantastic.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
And with the cover off:
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Mechanical/digital clock progress: the minutes display!
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Exactly.
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
I use this paper in my class, but it focuses on ion traps. A lot of similar concepts come up though, so it might be useful. arxiv.org/abs/1904.04178
arxiv.org
Trapped-Ion Quantum Computing: Progress and Challenges
Trapped ions are among the most promising systems for practical quantum computing (QC). The basic requirements for universal QC have all been demonstrated with ions and quantum algorithms using few-io...
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
so you can tune the lasers to only absorb at certain values of the B field (i.e. certain distances from the center of the trap.)
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Jesse Berezovsky @jesseberezovsky.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
There is a bigger force when an allowed optical transition is resonant with a laser. At B=0 (the center of the trap), the laser is tuned just off of an optical transition. The photons cannot be absorbed in this case. When a field is applied, the levels split, changing the absorption lines....
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