Thanking the editor for rejecting our paper

Here is an email that I sent to an editor who rejected our paper.  The names have been changed to hide the identity of the journal and editor.  I probably should not have removed the names because the "lord almighty protects the innocent as a matter of daily routine" - from, The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Dear Editor,

I am writing this letter to you directly, and not through the editorial office, to commend you on your work as editor of Journal X.   I know that this is a tough job and papers such as the one my colleague Prof. Awesome submitted to you take lots of time and effort to adjudicate; and, are emotionally taxing, taking us away from what we love - doing Physics.

I just wanted to let you know that although you rejected our paper, I believe that you did so for all the right reasons, balancing the requirements of the journal with the input you got from the referees.  We understand that our work overlaps a little bit with lots of areas, making it too mathematically complex for quantum chemists, has applications in nonlinear optics which graph people do not appreciate, and deals with abstract objects that main-stream nonlinear opticians know nothing about.  Though we believe that the work is significant, the field needs to develop for there to be a critical mass of researchers that can appreciate the topic.  As such, I agree with your assessment that though the paper may be correct, it will probably go unnoticed for many years.

Again, we appreciate your efforts and the thoughtful manner in which you approached our paper.  I hope that our paths will someday cross and wish you all the best for the new year.

Regards,
Mark

-- 
Mark G. Kuzyk
Regents Professor of Physics,
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-2814

Phone: 509-335-4672
Fax: 509-335-7816

Web Page: www.NLOsource.com

The nasty revewier strikes again - the third time is not a charm!

We sent a paper to a third journal and appear to have had the same reviewer again!  The review appears below.  Is it the same person?

The manuscript contains a  confusing and irrelevant approach to estimate maximal values that second and third order dipolar polarizabilities  can attain. The authors  also claim that this approach can be exploited to find   nonlinear  materials with optimal values for these coefficients without specifying  structural, chemical or other related  material characteristics: the Holy Grail in the quest of  nonlinear optical materials.

The approach is an extension of previous ones  with vaguely similar ingredients  and claims that  appeared in a series of publications  essentially by the same group and are extensively and exclusively referred  in the ms .  For a change this time the approach is disguised  with  “cartoons”   representing  “quantum graphs” (QG) and “star motifs”  that can be stressed and bent to any purpose with adjustable assumptions and parameters  to meet the authors  wishful  claims. These QG bear little, if any,  relation to chemical  structural  characteristics of the material as the usual quantum chemical  approaches  do and are far more complicated  to  estimate and guide the search for  nonlinear materials .

In a way  their approach is a disguised, unphysical  and complicated  version  of a  qualitative “assessment” of the nonlinear polarizabilities/susceptibilities based on  an expansion of the  induced  el-dipole/polarization in terms of the parameter  (E/Eat) where E is the el-field of the light  and Eat is an average  atomic(roughly the  ionization field) or cohesive el-field   of the atom (molecule)/solid.  This qualitative approach served  to qualitatively justify the use and range of the perturbation approach in powers of E and to also get a rough estimate of the susceptibilities   in the form of ?(n+1) = 1/(Eat)n; although the estimates  were  order of magnitude off  some  trends  were plausibly  accounted.  A short account of this approach is given in any respectable book on nonlinear optics (see  for instance introductory chapter in  Y.R. Shen,  The Principles of Nonlinear Optics, John Wiley). The present authors  in a cavalier manner  make no reference  to this approach  and  proceed  with  their complicated and useless to any purpose approach .

I shall accordingly not comment any longer on the inconsistencies of their  approach and  the  irrelevance of their quantum graphs  for  conceiving  nonlinear  materials  with optimal values for the second and third order coefficients. In fact the whole discussion in the ms proceeds with ill defined  terminology and unsubstantiated  vague statements. I do not recommend acceptance  of the present ms for publication in JOURNAL XXX.

Even teeny weeny discoveries are great fun

This morning, in the process of editing a paper, I made a small discovery. We have developed a new mathematical framework for determining the properties of quantum graphs in terms of the properties of the pieces. This work provides simple identities on the pieces that will allow us to determine general principles form the ground up rather than having to calculate the properties of the full graph.

I have to run because my wife is calling me to lunch.

Here is my email to my collaborators.

Your introduction to edge states was perfect. I liked the physical approach that leads to the formalism. In fact, its clarity was instrumental in allowing me to make a minor discovery (see below).

With regards to the paper, EDGE STATES ARE WONDERFUL! I am taking a break for lunch now, but FYI, I have been working soley on the appendix because I have done what I think is a really neat calculation which uses the power of the edge state. If you recall, in the past, we used the fact that the sum over all of the edges yields the full sum rule. However, it turns out that there are sum rules on each edge! The edge state formalism has allowed me to do this very easily. The result is given by Equation A20 of the geometry. I have pretty much dropped everything to work on this, but I will need to get back to preparing my talks for SPIE since I still have lots to do.

I suggest the following. I still need to reread the appendix because I was making changes while calculating -- never a good thing in terms of introducing typos. I will work on this after lunch. In the meantime, please check the appendix and let me know if I made any errors. The result is so logical that it seams right. I will then alternate between working on my talks and working on the paper.

Most likely, I will not go in to work today so that I can finish the paper in time to be posted on the archives tonight. Even these small discoveries are great fun.

A correspondence with a colleague on our nonlinear topology/geometry project

We are not resting on our laurels, but rather are continuing to work on new ideas and extending our work to more general cases.  In the process, we call get confused about the physics of the system, and try to find ways to picture what is going on that gives insights into how a system may behave under various conditions.

In working on this project, I realize that I spend lots of time writing emails to colleagues and students about various aspects of the work.  An email may come in at 10:30 at night because my collaborator is hot to figure something out and wants insights.  I too write emails at weird hours asking students for more details on something they observed in an effort to test my newest crazy ideas.  This is not a line of work for those who want to sleep soundly.  Being excited about physics is the best stimulant.

Anyway, today I took a two-hour break to play floor hockey and found a series of emails from a collaborator who is very excited (as am I) on the new direction of our work and the new physics that is implied.   Since we are moving into new territories, many things are not well mapped out, so we have to navigate partially by instinct.  I occasionally like to post excerpts from emails to give readers a sense of the kinds of exchanges that we have in the process of working on a project.  Here is my response to an exchange about a new quantum graph that we are working on, as shown above.

An excerpt from my email response (edited for typos and names removed):

First, I think there is a big difference in taking the limit as the prong length goes to zero and actually having a zero prong length.  In the former, I think that you get a broken vertex, because as the wire gets shorter, the end of the wire is getting closer to the vertex, so indeed the wavefunction on the prong must get vanishing small as the prong length goes to zero.  Then, this will look identically to a break in the loop.  Of course, when there is no prong, you get the traveling wave solutions.  So it is interesting that the limiting case yields a very different result than the case without the prong - again a statement about topology.  As long as the prong is there, no matter how short, the topology is of a loop-star.  Get rid of a prong, and then it is just a loop!


I am a little confused about what you are saying with regards to the ground state energy.  So, let me just make a point that may not be related at all to what you are saying.  If I have a prong with zero wavefunction, the loop cannot have a constant wavefunction, i.e. the wavefunction with n=0.  By continuity, the amplitude of the constant wavefunction will be zero, so there is no particle in the system.  So, I believe that in a loop, you have the zero-energy wavefunction but as long as a prong is there, you will not have a zero-energy wave function.


However, you bring up an interesting possibility of a wavefunction in which there is zero wavefunction in the prong and a standing wave in the loop in which there is a node at the prong.  This seems to be alright in terms of the continuity of the wavefunctions, and probability current is certainly conserved.  So unless there is another constraint that I am not seeing, this looks reasonable.


The problem is that this may be a legitimate wavefunction, but not an energy eigenfunction and is therefore not a stationary state.  Forcing this kind of state would be like having a particle in a box wave function, let's say with multiple nodes.  Having the wavefunction oscillate to he left of the node, then zeroing it to the right of the node obeys all the boundary conditions, but, this is not an energy eigenstate.


So, I think I will stick with my original assessment, though now I have thought about this for an additional 10 minutes for a total of 15.  I am not confident in my view because I have not done anything with paper and pencil, just picturing things in my head - a very dangerous activity!


These kinds of discussions do not come out of the graduate students until the point that they are getting ready to graduate.  Only then does a light bulb turn on, which makes them get it.  Once they become very useful and great fun in terms of being intellectually stimulating, they leave for greener pastures.  Then they can start to challenge and stimulate their new advisers.