Like Danial I am currently collaborating with the team in Konstanz, and also like Danial I am doing so remotely from Grenoble. With tools like video conferencing and virtual blackboards, it's OK for us theorists. A positive consequence, I thought, was that I could continue going backcountry skiing - or so I thought until it became clear winter weather was being skipped this year...
Anyway, it will not be this Brit who becomes the first to complain about sunny weather!
The aim of the collaboration is to study radiative heat current noise, in a system of parallel metallic sheets separated by a gap. Studying fluctuations (rather than averages) often reveals key physical information about the system! So far I have been learning to employ the formalism of nonequilibrium Green's functions. This powerful theory offers a microscopic justification for the phenomenological theory, fluctuational electrodynamics, that I have used in previous work.
