Sunday, May 10, 2015

Reviving Gentoo VMware support

Sadly over the last months the support for VMware Workstation and friends in Gentoo dropped a lot. Why? Well, I was the only developer left who cared, and it's definitely not at the top of my Gentoo priorities list. To be honest that has not really changed. However... let's try to harness the power of the community now.

I've pushed a mirror of the Gentoo vmware overlay to Github, see

If you have improvements, version bumps, ... - feel free to generate pull requests. Everything related to VMware products is acceptable. I hope some more people will over time sign up and help merging. Just be careful when using the overlay, it likely won't get the same level of review as ebuilds in the main tree.

Monday, May 4, 2015

PRB accepted: Transport across a carbon nanotube quantum dot contacted with ferromagnetic leads: experiment and non-perturbative modeling

It's time to announce yet another nice result. Our manuscript "Transport across a carbon nanotube quantum dot contacted with ferromagnetic leads: experiment and non-perturbative modeling" has been accepted as a regular article by Physical Review B.
When ferromagnetic materials are used as contacts for a carbon nanotube at low temperature, the current is strongly influenced by the direction of the contact magnetization via the so-called tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR). Since the nanotube contains a quantum dot, in addition its electronic energy levels play an important role; the TMR depends on the gate voltage value and can reach large negative and positive values. Here, in another fruitful joint experimental and theoretical effort, we present both measurements of the gate-dependent TMR across a "shell" of four Coulomb oscillations, and model them in the so-called "dressed second order" framework. The calculations nicely reproduce the characteristic oscillatory patterns of the TMR gate dependence.

"Transport across a carbon nanotube quantum dot contacted with ferromagnetic leads: experiment and non-perturbative modeling"
A. Dirnaichner, M. Grifoni, A. Prüfling, D. Steininger, A. K. Hüttel, and Ch. Strunk
Phys. Rev. B 91, 195402 (2015); arXiv:1502.02005 (PDF)