Ming's Blog

Today, I came across Landau's Wikipedia page and the biography of Landau written by Dr. Lifshitz in Volume 1 of Course of Theoretical Physics "Mechanics". His diverse knowledge in theoretical physics and research attitude really impress me a lot. His name indeed appears in many physics textbooks, but what astonished me the most is that he learned about the latest research results from seminars instead of reading papers, and he always by himself worked out the novel research results that interested him instead of following the authors' reasonings.

After the publication of this paper , about the signature of chiral Majorana zero modes in the quantum anomalous Hall insulator, Prof. Jason Alicea wrote a commentary on  Journal Club for Condensed Matter Physics . However, Prof. Beenakker wrote another commentary to oppose this experiment, in which he cited two theoretical articles showing that the e 2 /2h does not need the presence of chiral Majorana modes. This argument is actually just recently confirmed by  a recent experiment . It is always fun to read the discussions between physicists. Science evolves through them.