Challenges and solutions for autism in academic geosciences

Researcher diversity promotes research excellence. But academia is widely perceived as inaccessible to those who work in non-stereotypical ways, and disabled researchers are consequently chronically under-represented within higher education. The barriers that academia presents to the inclusion and success of disabled individuals must therefore be understood and removed in order to enhance researcher diversity and improve the quality and quantity of research. Autism is a disability that is particularly under-represented within higher education, despite many autistic individuals having attributes that are conducive to research excellence. With a focus on geosciences, we use the experiences of an autistic PhD student to evaluate why academia can be inaccessible, and propose simple strategies that can reduce and remove barriers to academic success. We suggest that minor changes to communication, the academic environment and better disability awareness can make significant differences to the inclusion of disabled researchers, particularly those with autism. These changes would also benefit the wider scientific community and promote research and teaching excellence

Bulk viscosity and the conformal anomaly in the pion gas

We calculate the bulk viscosity of the massive pion gas within Unitarized Chiral Perturbation Theory. We obtain a low temperature peak arising from explicit conformal breaking due to the pion mass and another peak near the critical temperature, dominated by the conformal anomaly through gluon condensate terms. The correlation between bulk viscosity and conformal breaking supports a recent QCD proposal. We discuss the role of resonances, heavier states and large-$N_c$ counting.Comment: Revised version accepted in Phys.Rev.Lett. 4 pages, 3 figure

Structure and energetics of solvated ferrous and ferric ions: Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics in the DFT+U formalism

We implemented a rotationally-invariant Hubbard U extension to density-functional theory in the Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics framework, with the goal of bringing the accuracy of the DFT+U approach to finite-temperature simulations, especially for liquids or solids containing transition-metal ions. First, we studied the effects on the Hubbard U on the static equilibrium structure of the hexa-aqua ferrous and ferric ions, and the inner-sphere reorganization energy for the electron-transfer reaction between aqueous ferrous and ferric ions. It is found that the reorganization energy is increased, mostly as a result of the Fe-O distance elongation in the hexa-aqua ferrous ion. Second, we performed a first-principles molecular dynamics study of the solvation structure of the two aqueous ferrous and ferric ions. The Hubbard term is found to change the Fe-O radial distribution function for the ferrous ion, while having a negligible effect on the aqueous ferric ion. Moreover, the frequencies of vibrations between Fe and oxygen atoms in the first-solvation shell are shown to be unaffected by the Hubbard corrections for both ferrous and ferric ions.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Submitted to Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistr

Manipulating electronic states at oxide interfaces using focused micro X-rays from standard lab-sources

Recently, x-ray illumination, using synchrotron radiation, has been used to manipulate defects, stimulate self-organization and to probe their structure. Here we explore a method of defect-engineering low-dimensional systems using focused laboratory-scale X-ray sources. We demonstrate an irreversible change in the conducting properties of the 2-dimensional electron gas at the interface between the complex oxide materials LaAlO3 and SrTiO3 by X-ray irradiation. The electrical resistance is monitored during exposure as the irradiated regions are driven into a high resistance state. Our results suggest attention shall be paid on electronic structure modification in X-ray spectroscopic studies and highlight large-area defect manipulation and direct device patterning as possible new fields of application for focused laboratory X-ray sources.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure