First paper finished

High critical magnetic field superconducting contacts to Ge/Si core/shell nanowires

My group has crossed an important milestone today – we have finalized and uploaded to arxiv our first publication. We are working on several of them simultaneously, and by the luck of the draw the first one out is a paper in which we share our experience making a particular type of nanowire superconducting.

The one and only good thing about writing papers is that it stimulates the authors to think about the experiment they have done in a special way: to find explanations for strange values and effects that only come forward when you give it that extra careful look. That tenth reading that you do under duress of scientific correctness. When we transition into the era of open science, we will share all our results on the fly, and look like fools for all our misconceptions and mistakes, but we will correct each other and move forward much faster. We will parallelize our intellects to think about each other’s work and won’t need to read the same text over and over again not to miss an embarassing mistake.

For now we just keep writing papers.