Seminar Notes on Electron-Phonon Interaction
October 20, 2020
Link to my notes
The handwriting notes are based on a seminar series on the topic of electron-phonon interaction (EPI) from first principle, hosted at ICTP, Italy, 2018. You can download it by using the link here. These notes might be some preliminaries for my next paper.
Updates on my life
It’s been a while without much done either for my Ph.D. or for my life. First thing worth mentioning is that I finished my first draft on my DFT+ML method for investigating correlations between different polyatomic arrangements in a hydrated lattice. The comments got from my advisor are not harsh but some were bit dissmissive from a perspective of the author, as the author tried to explain the math in the manuscript for one whole week while slep 4 hours a day. The puzzling emotion in the comments is expected as ML has nothing to do with my advisor’s previous training, but I still believe I found something unique, and cannot be revealed easily using DFT calculations or experiments. I guess my current paper showed, for the first time to the eyes of chemical physcists, that ML model is not just a black-box predictor, but an inspirational equippment for researchers to explore energy landscapes of complicated atomic systems. This sounds like bragging, but hey, academic work needs advocating too~
Second, I was turned down by a girl, a clever and pretty girl that I’m no longer so sure that I’m worthy to her. Without any sign of kinship in my rearview, the rejection left me at a crossroads with three branches laying out for me to choose. The first one is chaotic, with neon lights shinning ahead. It’s a path towards a solid job either as a researcher, or as a professional in a company. The second one is foggy and tortuous, and all I can see is a candle light dancing in a tiny house along the path. Everything growing along the second path is bleak, but I cannot take my eyes off the candle whenever I turn my face towards it. The candle is my vanishing yet long-lasting childish ambition: study somthing truly meaningful to me in the realm of mathematical physics. The last path is built on a cliff, leading to a mountaintop where a small group of entrepreneurs are celebrating their success and laughing at the victums of the dangerous cliff. So far, I’m biased towards the second path, as I really, I mean really, want to find a corner in this world, light a candle, do my own studies without worrying anything but doing my math right. In a sense, I wanna become a math monk like Grothendieck but much dumber than him. You may find this idea weird but after some reflections of my life, I feel no urge to find a job or get to know a girl. I am approaching to a point of being a intelligent male rat in the No.25 universe, the rats that only mind their own businesses. Please save your empathy if you think the rejection was a traumatized experience. It actually wasn’t, and I have experienced something much worse than that. Like I said, she is quite clever and knows how to deal with propositions from guys. Instead, it’s a trigger that cuts off a sensitive variable in the function called my life. After the rejection, I somehow became more focused on thinking how I think for the last three years. A subset of the questions I’ve been wondering contains: how did I end up with those choices? Why did I get obssessed/lose interests in somthing? What are the components of my life that I need serious philosophy to fit in? How should I judge if my emotion is toxic or not? I don’t have all of them sorted out yet. If I do, I might start to write a book about my answers, possibly in Chinese, with a name of “Principles and techniques for surviving Ph.D.”. The performance of my book on the market might eventually drive me to the third path. Ah-ha, I just find a fiber bundle structure between the second and the third path！
Last but not the least, I get to know a very smart and interesting physicist who believes that the world is essentially classic and dislikes Einstein’s relativity much more than I do.