Winter in East-Zürich

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in mid-February I got nice idea to take my bike out for a spin and to smoothly re-locate my physical body close to internet and the rest of the World - jep, to go to work :).

So the plan was simple - go little bit downhill and the make ascent to hilltop using some new route from northeast side... Light blue imaginary track on the map which starts from green X - the apartment.

I learned several lessons today:
a) Going downhill is fast, much faster than uphill. So if you turn 90 degrees to compensate from wrong direction you really have to pedal 10 times more to make a difference.
b) At hilly places all streets are twisty and it's impossible to navigate without a map. I ended up at hillside and worked my way up the hill (about 250m vertical) to realize, that it's the wrong one!

c) It gets really cold when going downhill for 5 min.

d) You can almost get to where you wanted, with small mistake like being 100m above or below your destination :)

Anyhows, now I know where all the nice villas are at and the location of Zürich Zoo. And got some wintery pics from my detour. Pic on the left shows hilltop where Protestants and Catholics fought a battle around 1340-s and right one shows view over the villas on the lake.

Quantum Critical Regime

I'll post some work related stuff too, so dear reader wouldn't get confused about why I am here at ETH. Let's consider a 1dimensional chain of 1/2 spins with alternating antiferromagnetic Heisenberg exchange coupling constants denoted by Ja and Jb. If Ja is much larger than Jb then the ground state of such system will be singlets on dimers on bonds "a" and for vice versa parameter values Jb >> Ja there will be dimers on bonds "b". When Jb=Ja then we get a ground state described by Luttinger Liquid (in 3D we would get a nice Neel order, but not in 1D). Somewhere between these regions lies a quantum critical point at which ground state jumps form one order to another. With temperature above zero (Kelvins of course) this point gets wider in phase diagram and becomes quantum critical regime (QCR). Now the question is: what order such spin system has in QCR and by which easily measurable observables should one try to detect such state? I am no theorist, so will search the literature and you'll get the answer when I do. If ya know the answer just write it in the comments :)

No Country of Flat Lands

After 3 days of biking to work all starts to make sense... Firstly, there is no hurry the hill is not going anywhere. Secondly, look around, there some sights to be seen from elevated places. Thirdly, you will not find a sign saying that the road has incline or decline, because it always has and it would take about a year's worth of global production of sheet metal to put up signs for this.

Went shopping by bike yesterday and got lost of course. It was easy going downhill and no time to look around when you are doing 65km/h. Coming back was interesting - since it's uphill, you really don't want it to bee the wrong road and putting off the ascent led me almost to city center from where it was even harder to go up. What goes down must come back up again, should be Swiss version of the proverb :)

To prove the sightseeing thing check a February morning view from Höngg over Zürich and actually also the lake and the Alps if you can see through the fog. The fog is always here, seems strange although it was almost clear sky today, the fog remained...

Cheese and yodeling

Let me make two things clear: on the contrary to what many people believe not all Swiss cheese has holes and I have never seen a Swiss man yodeling. But the mountains are as they are known to be - steep and endless :) After reassembling my bike from air-transport setup I did a small loop around Höngg and must say that even this small hill almost killed me. Hope things will get better with training otherwise I'll just take the bus to next hill. Strangely enough running was much easier than I anticipated, so there is lot's of motivation for jogging now.

Zürich has been voted as the best place to live in for 7 consecutive years by some bunch of people, but I wonder if they considered the goodness per $$$ or not. It might be good, but you have to pay for it - application for living permit - 65 CHF + 20 CHF processing fee, some food for 2 days ~50 CHF, monthly bus ticket 77 CHF, etc. Darn, I am from eastern Europe and everything I know about pricing has to be multiplied by 2 or 3, it takes time to adjust... Same applies to living quarters - single room flat with kitchen is about ~1kCHF/month. But if you let somebody who knows local affairs very well to run the errands you can end up with less than ~0.4kCHF/month living expenses :) Ok, shower, bathroom and kitchen are shared, but still its incredibly cheap in comparison to street prices and gives a good platform to make friends. For example, today I met Rose, the dorm guru of our floor. She has been living there for 6 years and knows everything about everything and was very generous with information.

Soon there will be pictures with posts, since I can charge my camera again :p