Localization with off-diagonal disorder

Today, the Editor of International Journal of Modern Physics B communicated to me that my paper (see here) has been accepted for publication. This paper presents an application of my strong perturbation method to a typical condensed matter system having off-diagonal disorder. The interesting thing about is that this system is not localized for the state with zero energy. The perturbation series I get has the development parameter given by the ratio between coherence time and Fermi time, exactly the opposite of a weak localization scheme.

This paper has an interesting story. Writing down it I did not emphasize the essential fact that I was discussing a system with off-diagonal disorder. Finally, the referee hit the point and the paper has been accepted with a proper revision. This is again a lesson, if needed, that when the peer-review method works fine it is an advantage for all the community and there is a lot to gain both for authors and journals.

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Nicola Cabibbo and the Nobel prize

Nicola Cabibbo has been a teacher of mine at University “La Sapienza” in Rome. He taught me quantum field theory and I firstly got exposed to this beautiful construction of human mind through his wonderful lessons. I still have a vivid recollection of these lectures in the same room where Marcello Conversi explained us a lot of phenomenology ranging from blackbody radiation to Fermi theory of beta decay. Cabibbo was also my thesis advisor and he was there when I discussed it at my final “laurea” examination. So, I have a lot of reasons to regret for a missing deserved prize to him. I have read this article on Physics World and so memories flowed down. I have met him recently at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. That was when Sergio Ferrara come there to talk about supersymmetry (see here). Cabibbo awarded Ferrara with a medal of the Accademia and it was a very nice moment.

I should say that Cabibbo’s lectures about QFT are still in my mind and I mantain memos of them on my shelves. Anyhow, Cabibbo is part of history of physics. No prize can change this or change the role he had in the development of particle physics.