After I came back to Japan, I have gone through hectic time, because of the Swine flu. Of course I didn’t caught the flu, but I and my family unfortunately got a different flu which has very similar symptom. You can imagine what happened to me, in this Japan where the goverment is very very sensitive to find the first patient in Tokyo area. I won’t tell you more about this. But it was unfortunate that I couldn’t attend at interesting workshops held around Tokyo, one is the hot/dense QCD workshop at Hongo, the university of Tokyo, and the other is a focus week workshop on wall crossing at IPMU.
Today I got back to work, how happy I feel when I do calculations! For the previous few days I was on a bed, and could not think about any physics, because of the head ache. I really feel releaved that I could do calculations as before. So I started checking the draft of my new papers which are at my hand after my collaborators’ revisions. Hopefully we can put the draft out to the archive in coming weeks.
The seminar speaker today at my group was prof. Furusaki who leads condensed matter theory group in Riken. His introduction of topological insulators was insightful, and I was again amazed by how topological concepts and K-theory have been applied to classify insulators and superconductors. I thought that the K-theory is highly mathematical tool which, even in string theory, doesn’t appear so often, and today I saw that it really is related to real materials, that is fantastic. After the seminar which is for three hours (as usual), we trap the seminar speaker at our common room and enjoyed (asking) questions. Almost all of my confusions were resolved there. Furusaki-san also pointed out some reference, eventually that is the one written by one of my aquaintance at Yukawa institute, so I need to look at that paper. In any case, it is very nice to have discussions with Furusaki-san — I happened to know him for long years but haven’t actually had serious discussions before. Now his office is at a floor below our floor in the same building in Riken, so I can just walk to him and ask him questions — I hope he may not feel bothered by my stupid basic questions on condensed matter physics!
Next week, I will visit Nagoya university to give a talk on cosmic strings. I look forward to interact with poeple there in high energy physics, gravity and cosmology, and hadron physics.
