Monthly Archives: May 2006

Electron Band Structure in Germanium… a lie?

Someone tells it like it is, or at least pretends to… the 100%-real data is nice (read the whole article, it’s not all in the quote below)Kovar/Hall;

Electrons in germanium are confined to well-defined energy bands that are separated by “forbidden regions” of zero charge-carrier density. You can read about it yourself if you want to, although I don’t recommend it. You’ll have to wade through an obtuse, convoluted discussion about considering an arbitrary number of non-coupled harmonic-oscillator potentials and taking limits and so on. The upshot is that if you heat up a sample of germanium, electrons will jump from a non-conductive energy band to a conductive one, thereby creating a measurable change in resistivity. This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting “to first order”.

SGI Files for Bankruptcy – No Surprise

I was a strong advocate of moving our lab away from SGI, which was expensive and slow for our purposes, and on to Linux.

WSJ.com – Silicon Graphics Files For Chapter 11 Protection

Silicon Graphics Inc., a long-struggling maker of high-performance computers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

A group of bondholders agreed to trade their debt for a stake in the company, which filed for Chapter 11 protection Monday morning in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York.

Silicon Graphics is known for desktop workstations and larger server systems that are favored by engineers and others who demand sophisticated graphics, including Hollywood studios. But the company has suffered a long slide, partly due to competition from machines based on standard components used in personal computers.

Trayanova lab in Tulane University Magazine

We made the Tulane University Magazine – an online thing where Tulane puts stuff they think they should tell the Tulane community and the world. They made a few mistakes (biomechanical engineer?) but I think it’s a nice picture. It reads pretty much like any generic story about our lab.  Notice Rob and I using the 30″ cinema display in the background.

Tulane University Magazine – News

The subtle rhythms, pulses and patterns of the human heart have fascinated poets, lovers and scientists alike for millennia, yet the heart’s deepest secrets remain tightly locked. Tulane biomechanical engineer Natalia Trayanova and her team may have the most incisive insight into the heart’s electrical signals, with a three-dimensional virtual model that demonstrates cardiac activity from cellular to organ level.