Kavli Summer School

The Kavli MRFM Summer School

The Kavli Institute at Cornell's MRFM summer school was the first gathering of the world-wide MRFM community. I think we, as a group, did an excellent job of defining the experimental and theoretical (and political) issues that will have to be tackled in order to take MRFM from one electron to one proton sensitivity -- and onward to single molecule imaging.

The summer school came together because of hard work, motivated by a string of lucky breaks: 1) We were very lucky to have been given a generous grant from the Kavli Institute. Equally crucial was 2) the the support of the Office of the Vice Provost for Research at Cornell, which was kind enough to let us share in the organizational genius of 3) Lesley Yorke. Once the summer school's infrastructure began to take shape, we were able to line up support -- again on VERY short notice -- from 4) my program manager, David Nelson, at the National Science Foundation, 5) IBM, 6) Kodak, 7) NYSTAR, 8) the Cornell Center for Nanoscale Systems, and 9) the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility.

Workshop Feedback

We collected feedback comments at the summer school, which I will condense and post once they are sorted. If you have changed your mind, or would like to add comments, please consider posting here. In order to get the next summer school started, it would be most helpful if people would tell me their opinions on:

• Timing: The attendees consensus was that the next one should be in 2 years. Agreed?
• Tutorials: More or fewer? Powerpoint or blackboard lectures? Problem sets?
  
• Location: Near someone's lab, in a big city, or at an isolated bucolic site?
• Czar: I would like more time to do fab work. Who can we draft to organize the next MRFM summer school?
  

We need these comments really soon, particularly if there is demand for a summer school in 2007: student travel grant proposals should ideally be submitted to ONR, ARO, NSF, and the NIH in early October.

The Kavli MRFM White Paper

As I discussed at the meeting, Kavli support comes with an opportunity (er ... obligation) to summarize the direction of our field in a white paper. I, with John Sidles' help, will make a first draft in the next few weeks. The draft will be posed, and comments will be collected here. I would like to get the white paper ready to submit by the time classes start at Cornell in the third week of August.

MRFM community

I think a sustained discussion is better than a short intense one. I have been thinking of ways be bring us all together every month for a few hours.

• Virtual Meetings: Each MRFM broadcasts a ~30-45 min talk that everyone can watch. We would do this once every one or two months. You don't have to wait until the APS to show people your exciting new data!
  
• Ongoing Tutorials: Post a 2-10 page document sumarizing, in detail, an important underlying theoretical concept like the minimum detectable frequency shift. The document gets commented on, revised, and posted to a permanent website. Again, we would try to keep these tutorial documens coming once every one or two months.
• Literature sharing and discussion, of both new and old articles. I for one could use help understanding the quantum measurement literature. Can we use http://www.citeulike.org/, for example ?
• Widget sharing: While we can't share cantilevers over the web, I would very much like to discuss ways that we can pool our resources to get more people access to cantilever and DSP technology.

Comments?