CHAPTER XXVIII. THE BREAKING OF THE STORM When Lady Arabella had crept away in her usual noiseless fashion, the two others remained for a while in their places on the turret-roof. Caswell, because he had nothing to say. Mimi, because she had much to say and wished to put her thoughts in order. For quite a while, which seemed interminable, silence reigned between them. At last Mimi made a beginning. She had made up her mind how to act. "'Mr. Caswell,' she said loudly, so as to make sure of being heard through the blustering of the wind and the perpetual cracking of the electricity.' Caswell said something in reply, but his words were carried away on the storm. However one of her objects was affected. She knew now exactly whereabout on the roof he was, so she moved close to the spot before she spoke again, raising her voice almost to a shout. "'The wicket is shut. Please do open it. I can't get out.' As she spoke she was quietly fingering a revolver which Adam had given to her in case of emergency and which now lay in her breast. She felt that she was caged like a rat in a trap, but did not mean to be taken at a disadvantage whatever happened. Caswell also felt trapped, and all the brute in him rose to the emergency. And a voice which was raucous and brutal, much like that which is heard when a wife is being beaten by her husband in a slum, he hissed out, his syllables cutting through the roaring of the storm. You came of your own accord, without permission or even asking it. Now you can stay or go as you choose, but you must manage it for yourself. I'll have nothing to do with it.' Her answer was spoken with dangerous suavity. "'I am going. Blame yourself if you do not like the time and manner of it.  I'll show you a light. You shan't be able to say that you could not see what you were doing.' As he spoke he was lighting another piece of the magnesium ribbon, which made a blinding glare in which everything was plainly discernible, down to the smallest detail. This exactly suited Mimi. She took accurate note of the wicket, and it's fastening before the glare had died away. She took her revolver out and fired into the lock, which was shivered on the instant, the pieces flying round in all directions, but happily without causing hurt to anyone. Then she pushed the wicket open and ran down the narrow stair, and so to the hall door. Opening this also she ran down the avenue, never lessening her speed, till she stood outside the door of Lesser Hill. The door was open at once on her ringing. "'Is Mr. Adam Sultan in?' she asked. "'He has just come in a few minutes ago. He has gone up to the study,' replied his servant. She ran upstairs at once and joined him. He seemed relieved when he saw her, but scrutinized her face keenly. He saw that she had been in some concern, so led her over to the sofa in the window and sat down beside her. "'Now, dear, tell me all about it,' he said. She rushed breathlessly through all the details of her adventure on the turret roof. Adam listened attentively, helping her all he could, and not embarrassing her by any questioning. His thoughtful silence was a great help to her, for it allowed her to collect and organize her thoughts. "'I must go to Caswell to-morrow, to hear what he has to say on the subject.' "'But, dear, for my sake, don't have any quarrel with Mr. Caswell. I have had too much trial and pain lately to wish it increased by any anxiety regarding you. "'You shall not, dear, if I can help it. Please, God,' he said solemnly, and he kissed her. Then in order to keep her interested so that she might forget the fears and anxieties that had disturbed her, he began to talk over the details of her adventure, making shrewd comments which attracted and held her attention. Presently into alia, he said, "'That's a dangerous game, Caswell, is up to. It seems to me that that young man, though he doesn't appear to know it, is riding for a fall.' "'How, dear, I don't understand. Kite-flying on a night like this from a place like the Tower of Castor Regis is, to say the least of it, dangerous. It is not merely courting death or other accident from lightning, but it is bringing the lightning into where he lives. Every cloud that is blowing up there, and they all make for the highest point, is bound to develop into a flash of lightning. That kite is up in the air and is bound to attract the lightning. Its cord makes a road for it on which to travel to earth. When it does come, it will strike the top of the tower with a weight a hundred times greater than a whole park of artillery, and will knock Castor Regis into pieces. Where it will go after that no one can tell. If there should be any metal by which it can travel, such will not only point the road, but be the road itself. "'Would it be dangerous to be out in the open air when such a thing is taking place?' she asked. "'No, little woman. It would be the safest possible place, so long as one was not in the line of the electric current.' "'Then do let us go outside. I don't want to run into any foolish danger, or far more, to ask you to do so. But surely if the open is safest, that is the place for us.' Without another word she put on again the cloak she had thrown off and a small tight-fitting cap. Adam, too, put on his cap and, after seeing that his revolver was all right, gave her his hand and they left the house together. "'I think the best we can do will be to go around all the places which are mixed up in the affair.' "'All right, dear, I am ready. But if you don't mind, we might go first to mercy. I am anxious about grandfather, and we might see that, as yet at all events, nothing has happened there.' So they went on the high-hung road along the top of the brow. The wind here was of great force and made a strange booming noise as it swept high overhead, though not the sound of cracking and tearing as it passed through the woods of high-slender trees which grew on either side of the road. Mimmy could hardly keep her feet. She was not afraid, but the force to which she was opposed gave her a good excuse to hold on to her husband extra tight. At mercy there was no one up, at least all the lights were out, but to Mimmy, accustomed to the nightly routine of the house, there were manifest signs that all was well, except in the little room on the first floor where the blinds were down. Mimmy could not bear to look at that, to think of it. Adam understood her pain, for he had been keenly interested in poor Lilla. He bent over and kissed her, and then took her hand and held it hard. Thus they passed on together, returning to the high road towards Castor Regis. At the gate of Castor Regis they were extra careful. When drawing near, Adam stumbled upon the wire that Lady Arabella had left trailing on the ground. Adam drew his breath at this, and spoke in a low earnest whisper, I don't want to frighten you, Mimmy dear, but wherever that wire is there is danger. Danger, how? That is the track where the lightning will go. At any moment, even now, whilst we are speaking and searching, a fearful force may be loosed upon us. Run on, dear, you know the way to where the avenue joins the high road. If you see any sign of the wire, keep away from it, for God's sake. I shall join you at the gateway. Are you going to follow that wire alone? Yes, dear, one is sufficient for that work. I shall not lose a moment till I am with you. Adam, when I came with you into the open, my main wish was that we should be together if anything serious happened. You wouldn't deny me that right, would you, dear? No, dear, not that or any right. Thank God that my wife has such a wish. Come, we will go together. We are in the hands of God. If he wishes, we shall be together at the end, whenever or wherever that may be. They picked up the trail of the wire on the steps and followed it down the avenue, taking care not to touch it with their feet. It was easy enough to follow, for the wire, if not bright, was self-colored and showed clearly. They followed it out of the gateway and into the avenue of Diana's Grove. Here a new gravity clouded Adam's face, though Mimi saw no cause for fresh concern. This was easily enough explained. Adam knew of the explosive works in progress regarding the well-hole, but the matter had been kept from his wife. As they stood near the house, Adam asked Mimi to return to the road, ostensibly to watch the course of the wire, telling her that there might be a branch wire leading somewhere else. She was to search the undergrowth and, if she found it, was to warn him by the Australian native, Kuwee! Whilst they were standing together, there came a blinding flash of lightning which lit up for several seconds the whole area of earth and sky. It was only the first note of the celestial prelude, for it was followed in quick secession by numerous flashes, whilst the crash and roll of thunder seemed continuous. Adam, appalled, drew his wife to him and held her close. As far as he could estimate by the interval between lightning and thunderclap the heart of the storm was still some distance off, so he felt no present concern for their safety. Still it was apparent that the chorus of the storm was moving swiftly in their direction. The lightning flashes came faster and faster and closer together. The thunder roll was almost continuous, not stopping for a moment, a new crash beginning before the old one had ceased. Adam kept looking up in the direction where the kite strained and struggled at its detaining chord, but, of course, the dull evening light prevented any distinct scrutiny. At length there came a flash so appallingly bright that in its glare nature seemed to be standing still. So long did it last that there was time to distinguish its configuration. It seemed like a mighty tree inverted, pendant from the sky. The whole country around within the angle of vision was lit up till it seemed to glow. Then a broad ribbon of fire seemed to drop on to the castle of Castor Regis, just as the thunder crashed. By the glare Adam could see the tower shake and tremble and finally fall to pieces like a house of cards. The passing of the lightning left the sky again dark, but a blue flame fell downward from the tower and with inconceivable rapidity running along the ground in the direction of Diana's grove reached the dark silent house which in the instant burst into flame at a hundred different points. At the same moment there rose from the house a rending, crashing sound of woodwork broken or thrown about, mixed with a quick scream so appalling that Adam, stout of heart as he undoubtedly was, felt his blood turn into ice. Instinctively, despite the danger and their consciousness of it, husband and wife took hands and listened trembling. Something was going on close to them, mysterious, terrible, deadly. The shrieks continued, though less sharp in sound as though muffled, in the midst of them was a terrific explosion, seemingly from deep in the earth. The flames from Castor Regis and from Diana's grove made all around almost as light as day, and now that the lightning had ceased to flash, their eyes unblinded, were able to judge both perspective and detail. The heat of the burning house caused the iron doors to warp and collapse. Seemingly of their own accord they fell open and exposed to the interior. The sultans could now look through to the room beyond where the well-hole yawned, a deep narrow circular chasm. From this the agonized shrieks were rising, growing ever more terrible with each second that passed. But it was not only the heart-rending sound that almost paralyzed poor Mimi with terror. What she saw was sufficient to fill her with evil dreams for the remainder of her life. The whole place looked as if a sea of blood had been beating against it. Each of the explosions from below had thrown out from the well-hole, as it had been the mouth of a cannon, a mass of fine sand mixed with blood, and a horrible repulsive slime in which were great red masses of rent and torn flesh and fat. As the explosions kept on, more and more of this repulsive mass was shot up, the great bulk of it falling back again. Many of the awful fragments were of something which had lately been alive. They quivered and trembled and writhed as though they were still in torment, a supposition to which the unending scream gave a horrible credence. At moments more mountainous mass of flesh surged up through the narrow orifice as though forced by a measureless power through an opening infinitely smaller than itself. Some of these fragments were partially covered with white skin as of a human being, and others, the largest and most numerous, with scaled skin as of a gigantic lizard or serpent. Once in a sort of lull or pause the seething contents of the hole rose, after the manner of a bubbling spring, and Adam saw part of the thin form of Lady Arabella forced up to the top amid a mass of blood and slime, and what looked as if it had been the entrails of a monster torn into shreds. Several times some masses of enormous bulk were forced up through the well-hole with inconceivable violence, and suddenly expanding as they came into larger space disclosed sections of the white worm which Adam and Cernophaniel had been looking over the trees with its enormous eyes of emerald green flickering like great lamps in a gale. At last the explosive power which was not yet exhausted evidently reached the main store of dynamite which had been lowered into the wormhole. The result was appalling. The ground for far around quivered and opened in long deep chasms whose edges shook and fell in, throwing up clouds of sand which fell back and hissed amongst the rising water. The heavily built house shook to its foundations. Great stones were thrown up as from a volcano. Some of them, great masses of hard stone, squared and grooved with implements wrought by human hands, breaking up and splintering in mid-air as though riven by some infernal power. Trees near the house and therefore presumably in some way above the hole which sent up clouds of dust and steam and fine sand mingled and which carried an appalling stench which sickened the spectators, were torn up by the roots and hurled into the air. By now flames were bursting violently from all over the ruins so dangerously that Adam caught up his wife in his arms and ran with her from the proximity of the flames. Then almost as quickly as it had begun the whole cataclysm ceased. Though a deep down rumbling continued intermittently for some time, then silence brooded over all, silence so complete that it seemed in itself a sentient thing. Silence which seemed like incarnate darkness and conveyed the same idea to all who came within its radius. To the young people who had suffered the long horror of that awful night it brought relief, relief from the presence or the fear of all that was horrible, relief which seemed perfected when the red rays of sunrise shot up over the far eastern sea, bringing a promise of a new order of things with the coming day. His bed saw little of Adam Sultan for the remainder of that night. He and Mimi walked hand in hand in the brightening dawn round by the brow to castor Regis and on to Lesser Hill. They did so deliberately, in an attempt to think as little as possible of the terrible experiences of the night. The morning was bright and cheerful as a morning sometimes is after a devastating storm. The clouds of which there were plenty in evidence brought no lingering idea of gloom. All nature was bright and joyous, being in striking contrast to the scenes of wreck and devastation. The effects of obliterating fire and lasting ruin. The only evidence of the once stately pile of castor Regis and its inhabitants was a shapeless huddle of shattered architecture, dimly seen as the keen breeze swept aside the cloud of acrid smoke which marked the sight of the once lordly castle. As for Diana's grove they looked in vain for a sign which had a suggestion of permanence. The oak trees of the grove were still to be seen, some of them emerging from a haze of smoke, the great trunks solid and erect as ever, but the larger branch is broken and twisted and rent, with bark stripped and chipped, and the smaller branch is broken and disheveled, looking from the constant stress and threshing of the storm. Of the house as such there was, even at the short distance from which they looked, no trace. Adam resolutely turned his back on the devastation and hurried on. Mimi was not only upset and shocked in many ways, but she was physically dog-tired and falling asleep on her feet. Adam took her to her room and made her undress and get into bed, taking care that the room was well-lighted both by sunshine and the lamps. The only obstruction was from a silk curtain drawn across the window to keep out the glare. He sat beside her holding her hand, well knowing that the comfort of his presence was the best restorative for her. He stayed with her till sleep had overmastered her wearied body. Then he went softly away. He found his uncle and Sir Nathaniel in the study, having an early cup of tea, amplified to the dimensions of a possible breakfast. Adam explained that he had not told his wife that he was going over the horrible places again, lest it should frighten her, for the rest and sleep in ignorance would help her and make a gap of peacefulness between the horrors. Sir Nathaniel agreed. We know, my boy, he said, that the unfortunate Lady Arabella is dead and that the foul carcass of the worm had been torn to pieces. Pray God that its evil soul will never more escape from another most hell. They visited Diana's Grove first, not only because it was nearer but also because it was the place where most description was required, and Adam felt that he could tell his story best on the spot. The absolute destruction of the place and everything in it seemed in the broad daylight was almost inconceivable. To Sir Nathaniel it was as a story of horror full and complete, but to Adam it was, as it were, only on the fringes. He knew what was still to be seen when his friends had got over the knowledge of externals, as yet they had only seen the outside of the house, or rather, where the outside of the house once had been. The great horror lay within, however age and the experience of age counts. A strange, almost elemental change in the aspect had taken place in the time which had elapsed since the dawn. It would almost seem as if nature herself had tried to obliterate the evil signs of what had occurred. True, the utter ruin of the house was made even more manifest in the searching daylight, but the more appalling destruction which lay beneath was not visible. The rent torn and dislocated stonework looked worse than before. The upheaved foundations, the piled up fragments of masonry, the fissures in the torn earth, all were at the worst.  Either some of the later explosions had thrown up from the deep quantities of water which, though foul and corrupt itself, had still some cleansing power left, or else the writhing mass, which stirred from far below, had helped to drag down and obliterate the items of horror. A gray dust partly of fine sand, partly of the waste of the falling ruin, covered everything, and though ghastly itself, helped to mask something still worse. After a few minutes of watching it became apparent to the three men that the turmoil far below had not yet ceased. At short irregular intervals the hell-broth in the hole seemed as if boiling up. It rose and fell again and turned over, showing in fresh form much of the nauseous detail which had been visible earlier. The worst parts were the great masses of the flesh of the monstrous worm, in all its red and sickening aspect.  Corruption comes with startling rapidity to beings whose destruction has been due wholly or in part to lightning. The whole mass seemed to have become all at once corrupt. The whole surface of the fragments, once alive, was covered with insects, worms, and vermin of all kinds. The sight was horrible enough, but with the awful smell added was simply unbearable. The worm's hole appeared to breathe forth death in its most repulsive forms. The friends with one impulse moved to the top of the brow where a fresh breeze from the sea was blowing up. At the top of the brow, beneath them as they looked down, they saw a shining mass of white which looked strangely out of place amongst such wreckage as they had been viewing. It appeared so strange that Adam suggested trying to find a way down so that they might see it more closely. We need not go down, I know what it is, Sir Nathaniel said. The explosions of last night have blown off the outside of the cliffs. That which we see is the vast bed of china clay through which the worm originally found its way down to its lair. I can catch the glint of the water of the deep quags far down below. Well, her ladyship didn't deserve such a funeral or such a monument. The horrors of the last few hours had played such havoc with Mimi's nerves that a change of scene was imperative if a permanent breakdown was to be avoided. I think, said old Mr. Sultan, it is quite time you young people departed for that honeymoon of yours.  Mimi's soft shy glance at her stalwart husband was sufficient answer. End of Chapter 28 End of The Lair of the White Worm by Brom Stoker.


I'm so happy that we're still doing this this weather has been feeling so cooped up Plus, I don't know if you noticed, but I finally got the new Lululemon yoga pants I am ready to live my best hashtag More like hashtag cold sweats found out recently that Lululemon is made from a cold Hi, I'm Dean here the filthy fashionista at stand out earth now You might be a little confused and asking yourself made with coal aren't leggings made from like lycra or something and you're right They are but it's not the fabric we're talking about here. Lululemon's got a cold problem. That's a little different So let me break it down for you You see most of Lululemon's factories are in countries like Vietnam Cambodia and China and they use coal for power and Electricity and that means the very factories that make your favorite yoga pants are burning coal and turning up major air pollution I'm sure I don't need to tell you this but coal is one of the deadliest fossil fuels out there and Responsible for millions of respiratory diseases and thousands of deaths each year Doesn't sound like something that aligns with Lululemon's healthy living vibes, right? And Lululemon's current climate targets do not stretch far enough to actually mitigate the massive emissions the factories It uses are producing. In fact 90% of the fashion industry's emissions come from the factories and material protection So if Lululemon is serious about elevating the world and protecting the environment it needs to ditch coal ASAP Why not go for renewable energy? It's cheaper than coal in those countries and better for our lungs and the ozone Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Now back to these two. Like all Vancouverites love to complain about the weather and do yoga, obviously More people need to know about this I had no idea that my leggings had such a complex connection to climate change Oh my god, I Literally posted a photo of me wearing Lulu at the climate march. I am going to tell everyone about this Now that you know Lulu's trade secret Are you ready to call on Lulu for some leggings that don't actually bring upon the next apocalypse? Share this video with all your friends and make sure to tag Lulu below


Sssssssssss- That's drunk! You would think that video games starring corporate mascots would be universally terrible, and you would be pleasantly surprised. There's no incentive for stuff like Coolspot or MickKids to be any good, but they are both pretty decent games that have held up well over time. So, naively, I held out some hope that this game, Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings might actually be decent, but unfortunately I was dead wrong. Izzy, no not that Izzy, is a slight spin on the corporate mascot, with this guy representing the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. He's just kind of a blue blob, almost like a cross between the blob from Clayfighter and one of the California raisins. For a very short time, this thing was everywhere. There were video games on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, there was one planned for the 32X, which was eventually canceled. There was even a cartoon and a big commercial campaign, and of course there was an actual person in a mascot costume that looked like this. Frickin' yikes, man. Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings was made in November of 1995 by a dev team called Alexandria, who also had a hand in the game adaptation of Demolition Man, which is admittedly an okay game. Izzy's Quest, however, this one is bad, but on the bright side it's at least bad in kind of a new way. Like for one, I don't think very many people remember this silly mascot, so there's some novelty there, I guess. And plus, the way this gameplay is just so oddly broken, it's something I rarely see in a Super Nintendo game. I'll get to that in a bit. First, let's get the basics out of the way. You get a health meter and three lives with zero continues to get through nine levels, with no saves or passwords, with the idea being to get back the five different Olympic rings that make up the logo, which have been stolen by evil, anti-Olympic creatures, I guess. I don't know. The gameplay is almost exactly what you'd expect from a game like this. You wander around in huge worlds, one of those collectathons where you're constantly finding coins and medallions and racking up points while you're bouncing on top of enemies. To this game's credit, there's one fun mechanic here. When you find these stars, you morph into a different form. Like a rocket, a hang glider, a hammer, a, uh, baseball player? And of course, a totally radical 90s skateboarder, dude. Unfortunately, these power-ups are not randomly placed. They're predetermined, and they're used to get you past specific sections, kind of like the way it's used in Yoshi's Island. Still, this function makes this game seem like it might be pretty fun, right? Let me answer that for you. No, they do not. Izzy's Quest has some of the weirdest slowdown performance issues I think I've seen in any game, and it doesn't help that the controls have that weird awkward delay to them that makes the entire game seem like it takes place underwater. Now, sometimes with a game like this, you have to be a little patient and let the controls sink in a bit and play the game by its rules, so to speak, but with Izzy's Quest, it's not just the bad controls, the performance is bad. Slowdown comes and goes, the game speeds up out of nowhere, even on sections like this where Izzy is riding his gnarly tubular skateboard. Everything just looks jittery, like the game had too much coffee or something. It is a constant, never-ending issue to the point that I find myself getting a headache playing this one. I've never seen a Super Nintendo game with performance issues this bad, it's to the point where I think there's something wrong with my Flash cartridge or my Super Nintendo or something. Doubling down on the weirdness is that the same issues happen with the Sega Genesis version. It performs better overall, but the gameplay is still inexplicably choppy and slow, and that slowness comes and goes without any rhyme or reason. Another annoying thing is the button layout. There are two jump buttons. The Y button uses the spin jump, which you use to jump on top of enemies, and the A button uses the hurdle jump, which is a longer jump to help you reach platforms further away. Okay, two jump buttons, whatever, but why are they assigned to Y and A? That is stupidly unintuitive. Thankfully, in the options menu you can switch the spin jump to the B button, and the hurdle jump to whatever. My preference would have been the R button, that's what I always do with Mega Man X's dash, but this game restricts you to only using B, A, Y, and X. And yes, two of those buttons aren't even used most of the time. One can be used as an attack when you've morphed into another form, but that's it. But yeah, that's basically the entire game. It uses two jump buttons, one button you use as an attack once in a while, all while dealing with bizarre slowdown issues that pop up out of nowhere, off and on throughout the entire game. That's the most frustrating part for me personally, because I mean, take a look at this part where you're flying as a rocket. Hey, that's pretty cool, no slowdown here. This looks like it could be fun, but way more often than not, you're left wondering if someone accidentally poured some crystal Pepsi on your Super Nintendo console because this game struggles to run even the most basic gameplay sequences. Maybe if those issues were resolved, Izzy's quest for the Olympic rings might be decent. I mean, the morph mechanic is kind of fun, but otherwise you should stay away from this one. All right, I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


Hello, this is LaptopMedia, and today, we will show you how to open the MSI Pulse GL66 and what's inside of it. To get inside of this device, you need to undo 13 Philips head screws. After that, pry the bottom panel with a plastic tool and remove it from the chassis. Please remember, it would be of great help to us if you just hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. That would motivate us to make even more and better videos for you. This Notebook's battery pack has a capacity of 53.5 watt hours. Thankfully, there are two RAM Sodom slots that fit 64GB of memory in total and work in dual-channel mode. Interestingly, this is one of the few devices that still feature a 2.5-inch SATA drive bay. Furthermore, there are two M.2 PCI-EX4 slots. Lastly, the cooling solution comprises a total of six heat pipes. Two of them are cooling the CPU, three are intended for the GPU, while one is meant for the graphics memory and voltage control. If you'd like to see more disassembly videos of the latest Notebooks we would highly appreciate if you hit the like button and subscribe to the channel.


Welcome to this very special extended holiday edition of Supercharged and Paul. Santa Louis here, ready for Christmas. Santa, I recognize that name. And this is the show where I take the sites that you've submitted and I go through them and I try and find and fix performance issues. And today's no different, yay, merry Christmas. It's Slack, that's what we're gonna look at today. I like Slack an awful lot. And we have a Chromium Dev Slack, which will be the target for our performance profiling today. So I know I said to them, is there anything in particular that you're seeing and that you think we should look at? And they went, oh yeah, actually, there's this quick switcher, if you hit Command K, it takes a long time for it to come up on screen and we don't really know why. Fair enough, okay, well we'll start there. But as it happens, I think there might be a few other things that we see along the way. It's a bumper, it's the right time of year to give you extra.  Oh, scrolling issues, oh, what's in there?  Bring me the mince pies, oh, oh. So what we'll do, we will hit record and we're gonna hit Command K and then we'll stop recording, yes. And we see the key down event over here and they are absolutely right. It is just shy of half a second in JavaScript terms here for the key down event. So the key down is me pressing Command K and it coming up on screen. So let's have a look at why. Well, I see these red triangles in the corner and I see a recalc style followed by a layout. So calculating styles on the page, followed by laying out elements on the page, followed by calculating styles on the page and then laying out the elements on the page, which seems superfluous at best. And actually, each one of these is really quite expensive. Like this first one is 93 milliseconds in calculating styles. So if we click on it, yeah, you see, just shy of 9,000 elements have been affected by this style change. That's an awful lot of elements that could be affected by a style change. You know, if you're gonna make some style changes, it's often quite good to be very specific about the styles that you want to apply, but it may just be that there's a lot of elements being added in this case, say to the page, for example, the quick switcher elements and that might be what the issue is because it's preceded by a power's HTML. So that makes me think there's new HTML coming in, it has its style calculations and then we force a layout as well. Same kind of deal except this has got 13,000 elements in play and again, 93 milliseconds and this is a fast desktop machine. This would be brutal on other devices. So big problem here then I guess. Now the good news is underneath, we actually start to get the call stack. So we can actually start to figure out why what was it that was called into that was triggering this problem and this is it here, there's clicking on apparently this anchor with book snag. I'm not sure what the deal is there, but it goes to jQuery, something to do with that. I'm not sure what that is. Then bootstrap with its modal and then modal show, modal backdrop, okay. And then eventually it seems to trigger and show. So something in this interplay between the roll-up client, the roll-up core and the bootstrap. Now it's gonna be very specific to them. Let's have a quick look at modal show just out of interest and it's minified. So again, for them out today would obviously go to your unminified and have a look around, do the same thing again. But if we start to see things like, yeah, add class, we're making a style change. We're basically making style changes. Yeah, we're reading a class. It has class fade, add class. So you start to sort of build up this picture fairly quickly that there's a check on styles followed by a mutation of styles. And then if somewhere later in that call stack, somebody else is reading a style and then writing a style, that's exactly what's gonna land us in this problem. Let's say it's their code. So I'd say, look, go and have a look at this. The call stacks are here. They will recognize their own code, I'm sure. And then it's a case of trying to pick it out and say, well, we should do all our reads up front, then all our writes. Libraries like Faston will do that for you, but you can still do it yourself. Just make sure that you're orchestrating your code very carefully. It can be tricky and that's why Faston exists because it will help you do that. And a lot of people use it very successfully. So that would be how I'd start for them. But while I was here, I noticed this update layer tree that comes straight after. Updating the layer tree is how Chrome organizes basically all the layers in the page. So where everything needs to sit in relation to everything else. And that's 73 milliseconds. That's monstrously long, really long. And again, especially so for such a powerful device. So what's going on? Well, layers is the answer, but how do we find out more about this? Well, we have a tool. We have a Chrome Dev tool. That's why it's called Chrome Dev Tools. Tools inside the tools. Switch on the paint profiler, hit record again. And what we'll do is we'll do a bit of a scroll. And I can tell you that that is pretty bad. We have to wait when we've got the paint profiler on. There's an awful lot of extra information that's coming in. So it does take a long time to pull that data in and actually parse it and get it ready for us to have a look at. So we have to do the happy dance. It's beginning to look good. Look, it's here. So what we can do is we can see six frames, five frames a second. And that's where the paint profiler on. So it would probably be near nine, 10 frames a second. Certainly not the 60 frames a second that we'd want. So if we click on the layers, the frame at the top, we get this layers tab that we can click into. This layer information is not yet available, but it does come up eventually. There we go. And we can make this a bit bigger. There we go. And we start to sort of see what all the layers are. That's all these boxes on the screen. And I'll tell you what we'll do is we'll just move ourselves back and we can spin this out into 3D space. Woo-hoo! Who doesn't love that? Nobody. There we are. Rotate. There we are. Look at that. That's great, isn't it? It looks like basically every single item in the Quick Switcher is getting its own layer. And that's going to be expensive to manage, I would imagine. We can confirm that, though, because what we can do is we can hit Escape and we would go to the rendering options. If they're not there for you, then you can go to More Tools, Rendering Settings, like that. And you can switch on Show Layer Borders. And yep, sure as we would expect, each one of these items in the list has got its own layer. And in fact, even the status icon inside has also got its own layer. And we can spin this down as well and inside the Omnibox, which is what that is. Yep, there we are. Omnibox item and then the presents. So basically the status. Now if we click on one of these items, we can see the reason that it got its own layer. ScrollParent is not an ancestor. No idea. Might overlap other composite content. Now that one, I can guess. That's basically, something's got a layer and one of these list items might overlap it. Okay, and then it says cannot be squashed because this layer has a different clipping container than the squashing layer. Yeah, this one. This one took me a long, long time to figure out when I was looking at this. I was like, oof. Yeah, even though I had to speak to a Chrome engineer and I was like, just what, huh? And they gave me a few hints and got to the bottom of it, which is good. It's kind of, kind of, is it going to work out? Who knows? It was an exciting time for me. It was. You always like that with performance work. You get thrown something and you're like, do some forensics. Will you solve the puzzle? Who knows? It's very exciting. That's why I do this. It's the question whether it is noble or in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against the sea of troubles and by doing so, back to the task at hand. Well, it turns out if you look at the container element. You have to scroll up for that apparently. There's a lot of them. There's a lot of them. I'm going to get there eventually. Got there. Okay. Omnibox results is the container element that's doing the scrolling. It has width, it has a height, but it has overflow y scroll and overflow x hidden. It's clipping that list, which is great. That's what we'd want it to do. That makes perfect sense. However, every single item inside the list, it too has overflow hidden. So each item is clipping its contents and what Blink does it goes, well, that's got its own clipping because it's overflow hidden. That clip doesn't match the parent's clip. Therefore, I'm just going to assume that it has to have its own layer because of that. So if we switch off overflow hidden on the children, all those layers disappear and we're going to get one big layer, which is probably going to be better. We'll switch on the timeline again, switch off the paint profiler so that it doesn't take all the extra information we don't need and we'll record and we'll scroll. Now we're getting something like 30 frames a second. So we're up from about, well, it's five, six, could be nine or 10 without the paint profiler, up to about 30. So definite improvement by having, in this case, one larger layer rather than, you know, hundreds or thousands of smaller layers. But that's still not 60 frames a second, which is what we'd want. So I see a lot of purple in this chart at the top and certainly that matches up with, yeah, about 12 milliseconds here of update layer tree, which is down from 20 odd, 24, 25, I think, to 12. So it's definitely better, but it's still not good. It should be a fraction of a millisecond, ideally speaking. So let's see if we can figure out what's going on. Well, again, we can switch on the paint profiler, do a quick run and see what's what. All we need is one of these frames. We'll go and wait for the layers. There we go. And we can see, we can actually see the list there. We'll reset the transform. You can see the list of items in the quick switcher. And yeah, you see here it's 66,266 pixels high. That's enormous. That's a huge layer that needs to be handled. And it's just probably putting blink under pressure. We can prove that, I think, by going through to the elements. And what we'll do is we'll select the Omnibox item and we will say display none. And that's going to give us nothing in the list, which is not so great. But what we can do is we can go and we can override that for a few of them. And so that we've got something to scroll. This is going to take us a minute or two. So we've got a few in the list now. So we've enabled like 10 of them or something like that. And so this list is basically nothing like the size it was. And we'll do another timeline recording. And we'll switch off the paint profiler here. We'll just have a go without. And we'll stop that. And yeah, we're basically at 60 frames a second now. And the update layer tree's gone from that 12, 13 milliseconds down to 3 milliseconds. So it's clearly the size of that layer is a big, big factor. But that still bothers me because it's still 3 milliseconds and it should be a fraction of a millisecond. So something outside of this quick switcher is probably causing an issue too. And my hunch is, having looked at this before, is it's going to be the actual content of the page. In fact, we can confirm that because what we could do is we could do a paint profile and we'll do a quick scroll of the page content. It is 60 frames a second. So we could stop here and that would be okay. But I would imagine that since this update layer tree is still quite big, we should see if we can figure it out. And yeah, so looking at this, the page dividers, we've got a message scroller div is 12,544 pixels. And the actual day divider, which seems to be the previous day's content, that is 12,000 pixels. That is 12,000 and so again. And by 10,000, so those are huge layers. And you can see that actually here. If we, let me get rid of that and we will zoom out. There we go. Yeah, there's the actual page in the bottom corner and this is what it is. I mean, even, there we are. That's what it actually looks like. There's the page content. We have another one here and the footer as well. For reasons I'm not quite sure why, but it seems to be that it is massive as well. So I guess if I were them for this and the quick switcher, I would say go to something that's like a recycler view where you've got a few much smaller DOM and your recycling elements. That means that the layout should be cheaper. The style calculations should be cheaper. Everything should be cheaper. And you can use something like request idle callback to only do those mutations to the DOM when the user's in idle and if you need to put up a spinner or something like that. Okay, but maybe you'd sort of take a slightly more nuanced approach where you use request idle callback or if it's getting quite pressing, you just do it immediately and you take the hit and maybe your frames per second will just waver a little bit. But it's certainly going to be a lot, lot better than having this huge set of layers that is just putting a blink under pressure here. So there you go.  The layers panel, the paint profiler, just dev tools in general and scrolling performance issues. Definitely want to take a look at this holiday season. If you find yourself with scrolling performance issues and it's not something like paint, it might be something like your layers. Check that out. Have a great holiday and I'll see you in 2016. It's exciting. Brand new year. It's a leap year.


ood. For the discussion regarding article 16, seeing none, do we vote on it? So table it and then bring it back. I move table. Second. Motion to second table. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you. I assume everyone else meant to say aye. I did. Good. I just thought it really loudly. Yes, Mr. Really. In past town meetings, each of us get a large three-wing binder. And I think that's put together by all three of our offices. Is it primarily yours, Adam, or ours, or is it? Are we doing that this year, or are we going to use these? I think it's still the binders. The binder. I'm not sure that town meeting is going to be set up on this type of a system. No, I meant for us, just I didn't mean for town meeting. Oh, OK. I think, Mr. Really, I think we don't put together the binders for town meeting. I think she means that Novus isn't necessarily going to be set up for town meeting. So we'll do the binders. Right, that's the program. It doesn't transition over to town meeting, like the program. Yes. OK, well, I was going to say I want the three-wing binder, anyhow. Oh, Kurt, well, you're going to get it. You're going to get it? You're going to get it? No. But I mean, it isn't set up. We're looking at it right here. This is a Warren article in our vote. What's different with, what do you mean? It's not set up for town meeting. Because it doesn't run all the articles. You'd have to get, yeah, exactly. You'd have to get the moderator involved. You'd have to get all the town meeting members and so on and so forth. And we've only done the implementation for the Board of Select. Yes, and I think we still have some kinks that I think we need to work out. I figured out what I did wrong, by the way, that caused my problem. So was it Novus or was it you? It's a feature within Novus that's not great. But I mean, and so you just, yeah. You know, I've been thinking about perhaps putting Novus on the agenda at a point in time and maybe discussing some issues about it. Just checking. But we'll save that for another day. We will, we do have to, like before we, in the meeting, we do have to go back to the discussion of future BOS meetings. Do you want to do, oh yeah, sure. Mr. Chairman. Yes. I got a hockey score. Yes. Final score, Arlington Catholic Four, Arlington High School One. Congratulations, Silicogers. Thank you very much. Congratulations. Yes. Congratulations to Arlington High School as well. I understand it's a very close game until the middle, about the middle of the game. Yeah, it was 1-1 after 2. Yes, but I'm looking forward to supporting Arlington Catholic in the finals. I hope everyone will join me in doing so. So going back, we have a discussion of future Board of Selections meetings. Okay, so starting in April, would we do the 13th and 27th? 27th is 10 meeting, right? Yeah, so that's the first night it would have to be. And I mean, it's either, yes. Do we typically have an organization meeting the Monday after election? The 6th is already scheduled. No, the Monday after is the 30th. Yeah, so we have the 30th and the 6th already scheduled, is that right? The 30th is scheduled, okay. So we have one schedule on the 6th? No, sorry, just, sorry, the 30th we have. I have the 30th, okay. Yeah, sorry. So want to do the 6th and the 27th? Work? No, no. If we're meeting on the 30th, which is the week, oh, so the 13th. Yeah, the 13th and the 27th, I think. Yes, I think that way, I guess I was not thinking properly. And what time do you want to do for the 27th? We have to do 6 p.m., correct? Isn't that the first night of 10 meeting? 10 meeting starts at 8, so. 7 p.m., right? 7. About 15 minutes. Oh yeah, right, right. When is Patriot's Day, the 13th? The 20th. 20th, okay. 7.15, the 27th, 7. Going into May, the, hmm. Yeah, we have Memorial Day on the 25th. Yeah. And we presumably have 10 meeting going 4th, 11th, 18th. We might actually have to schedule 4, 11, and 18, because of 10 meeting, right? Or should we just go with 4 and 18 for now? 4 and 18 and keep 11 open just in case. Okay. And those would both be at 7, with the town meeting. June. June 22. Bear with me in just a minute, I'm still. I am going away in June. So, are we ready to talk about June? Sure. Yes, we're gonna be keeping going. We're gonna be scheduling July, right? No. We're not. Oh, we're just gonna do June? June, yeah. Okay, so 8th and 22, okay. So, if, so did we say 8 and 22? That works, everybody. Yep. Yes, it does. I'm going, I'll be out of town though. So the 14th, but that works. Well, that was easy. Are we doing July and August, or no? No, on the, in the agenda. The schedule only goes to June. Okay. So, we'll attack that at a later time. Okay, and then, we've correspondence received a response to changing of flight patterns on runway 33L and veterans council seeking members. Thank you. I move receipt. I would note that, I didn't want to say that. Mr. Siano has been continually sharing material with both the chair and myself. I did share with him this, he hadn't seen this letter from, from the FAA. And I think that he has shared, at least with us. I think he's been communicating through us a response that seems a lot of communities got the same letter pretty much basically, basically telling us to take a hike. And Belmont has sent them a response and they're obviously trying to rally support from other communities based on that model. So we may want to put this back on the agenda again, if we're going to consider further action. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. Do you remember when Belmont was trying to get the support back? Don't. I'll look into it and we'll perhaps try to get it on the next meeting if that's soon enough. And if not, we'll maybe try to consider a different action of our, that works. And I think, and I know you notice the, our legislative delegation is trying desperately to get the new CAC fixed so that we're on it. And some other communities that were left off of it are on it, so we should stay tuned. Yes, this is, it's funny. This wasn't an issue I was ever expecting coming through at first. And it's pretty intricate and it's definitely an important one for us to see on top of because there's a huge quality of life issue that this is really hampering and it's just not very cool. I was disappointed in the reply because it didn't follow the nuance of what we were suggesting.  We were a lot more thoughtful and they said, don't be dumb, you know, really please read what we said. Yeah, very valid point. Thank you. They are frustrating. So there's a motion on the table. Was there a second? Second. The motion is second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you. New business, Marianne. No new business. One small personal matter. My wife is expecting on the 16th. My plan is to be here on the 23rd for the Selected Men's Meeting unless she's still, labor's not going done, but if that eventuality becomes a possibility, I will obviously, through the town manager advice, the board of how the situation can be handled and either make Mr. Miley available and make some other arrangements to make sure that the votes and comments and all the things that are necessary keep on moving. Thank you very much. Congratulations. I have no new business. There we go. Kevin. I have two pieces, Mr. Chairman. One is the select tones have a gig this Saturday evening at the St. Camilla, St. Patrick's Day celebration. And the other is I want to congratulate the Allenton High Quiz Team. They again participate this year in the High School Quiz Show, which is on channel two Saturdays at 6 p.m. 160 public and private high schools competed this year and Allenton High School made it to the round of 16. So on Saturday night, last Saturday night, they competed against Long Meadow. And I'm sorry, I don't know the answer. Oh, and we won and thrilled to now say Allenton High School won. So on April 18th, they will be competing against the winner of the Newton North and the Chelmsford. But a tremendous achievement and very well done on their part and we wish them the very best. And I want to especially thank, I was made aware of all of this by Catherine King, who sent me a note saying she's sorry she's going to miss the Selectones this year, but anyhow, good for them. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much, Mr. Dunn. It's been a long night and I can't restrain myself. So unfortunately, I will not be able to join the Selectones, I'll be in New York for business. And if you really want to impress them, you can remind them that it only is 314 Pi Day because it's 3.14. Super. That is Super Pi Day. Because as we all know, Pi is<PHONE_NUMBER>, which means at nine, Steve can't contain himself either, which means on Super Pi Day at 924 in the morning, it is the whole, you know, the first 10 digits all in one. I will not be able to sleep tonight. You're with that, no new business, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. That's very new business to me, actually, so. But it is interesting, it's the first time I've heard it. It only works if you use the American format for dates. The Europeans think we're crazy. Right, because they put the month first. For the date first, sorry, Joe. My jar is open. I work with computer programmers all day, that's the geekiest thing I've heard all week. Thank you for the plug because it is excellent work that the AEF is doing with trying to raise money for the technology program at the schools. The only business I had is, I unfortunately wasn't able to make it. I know the time manager told me about it. I think we all probably joined together in congratulating all of the police officers who were recognized last week at their award ceremony and promotions, and I'm not even gonna say anybody's name because there were a lot, including all the responders after the marathon tragedy. I know that the advocate carried most of the names I think online and such, so I'm sure we all congratulate them and thank them for their service to the town. Thank you, Joe. So I guess I do have two pieces of new business that I wasn't planning on having, but this is an important one. The, we were talking a lot about the hockey game tonight, but the Arlington High boys varsity basketball team had quite the season as well, and it's important to note that they lost in the playoffs up at the Songist Arena on Saturday to a very good day in their steam, but definitely a note of congratulations to that as well, and it's really great to see that a lot of sports has come through Arlington these days, and that's something I really like. So the other piece of new business is with our sister city relationship of Nagokukio. They have a new mayor, and mayor Kengo Nakakoji, and I'm sorry if I pronounced that wrong, but I think it's important that we reaffirm our, you know, the benefits of our sister city relationship, and we have a nice note from Mayor Nakakoji as well, and I know that he's a, or I've heard, he's a big proponent of the student exchange program, which is really where, you know, I think this program begins and ends with me because I think they get the most out of it, and that's a really cool thing, and I'm looking forward to supporting it and working with him moving forward. So that being said, I have no new business. Move we adjourned. Second. We'll motion a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you.


I had always had a business or entrepreneurial spirit, wanted to learn business, figure out the game of business. I left here with that skill set that I needed academically and I found an environment here that was very encouraging and challenging, of course. My senior year, I think that was the year I started to translate going from not really having a good understanding of what the opportunities were that I might be capable of pursuing, I was being instilled with the right toolkit. Probably most importantly was the courage and the self-confidence to go pursue those opportunities out in the wide world of business. And some of that courage didn't always come naturally, it was coming from some of the professors. Dr. Pruitt was the head of the HR program or chair of that program, I believe she was a constant words of wisdom and encouragement in my ears. And Dr. Pruitt was always helping me kind of get over whatever worries and anxieties I had and try to show me that there's a big world there. I started right out of the university with a company called Shell Oil Company in a refinery around the New Orleans area and immediately plugged into a pretty challenging job. The thing I learned right away is companies are wanting people that don't mind taking on responsibilities and accountabilities and I think maybe that's part of my upbringing. Felt like that was reinforced at Alabama as well, so I just applied the learnings I'd had academically and started learning about the professional world and had a chance to do jobs that were related directly to my degree and many that weren't. I came here with a pretty narrow field of view, I left here with a wide lens of realizing the world is full of great opportunities.


So I'd like to first start by thanking the organizers for inviting me to this important event and of course wish Boris many many years of Productivity and and happiness In this talk, I'd like to tell you about some of the recent work. This is unpublished work that we've been doing to explore the interplay between a superconductor and And and a semiconductor that has a very strong spin orbit interaction in it We're going to be exploring mostly the in-plane the in-plane Magnetic field effects on this induced superconductivity inside the semiconductor and what I'll show is that the induced pairing consists of finite momentum This momentum that the pair acquire is controllable in these systems furthermore the order parameter oscillates in space and the oscillations in the order parameter in space could be both Perpendicular to the contact as well as Parallel to them and and we understand quite well right now what the different regimes are and finally we can look at the data and understand under what conditions is the effect of spin orbit Interaction dominant in this system versus just plain Zaman The work that I'll be talking about was done by three graduate students in my group Sean Hart, Hetchum Ren and Michael Kosovsky The theory was derived in collaboration with Bert Halperin and this work is done in close collaboration with the group of Lawrence Mullen Kump who has provided us with materials as well as a lot of the A very good collaboration on how to fabricate these samples That is being developed in parallel in both groups So the materialist system that we're looking at is that of mercury telleride cadmium telleride quantum wells just very briefly Historically these materials were introduced In in order to demonstrate the first topological insulator demonstrating quantum spin Hall effect I'll mention that very very briefly, but this is certainly not the topic of this talk So mercury telleride itself here. You see the band structure is a semi metal It has the p orbitals Sitting above the s type orbitals in the in the band structure But nonetheless, it's not a semiconductor and so in order to generate a semiconductor out of mercury telleride You sandwich it between barriers of cadmium telleride and you see the effects here this is a sandwich structure and If the width of this mercury telleride sandwich between the conventional semiconductor cadmium telleride is narrow Then this inversion that appears in mercury telleride gets undone and the electron states Reside above the whole like states This occurs for very short Well widths less than six point three nanometers But as you increase the well width What happens is that you can reach a situation where band inversion occurs Nonetheless, but a true gap occurs because of science quantization and here you see that in this specific situation the Conduction band consists of whole like states very close to the bottom of the band and the valence band consists of electron like states so this is the inverted Type of structure and this is why this 2d material is a 2d topological insulators and it supports a quantum spin-haul Effect when the chemical potential is set into the gap the focus of this talk However, we'll be at chemical potentials that are in the conduction band We will tune density, but we're not really interested in the quantum spin-haul nature of this thing just to understand What the interplay of superconductivity and spin orbit in this material will be Here's a schematic of how the device looks we pattern out of this quantum well a Mesa structure And then we remove we remove the quantum well everywhere except in this green region We have these superconducting contacts that are these gray Gray contacts here. They make reasonably well Superconducting contact to the 2d electron system and then we deposit also a gate that allows us to look at this Induced superconductivity in this geometry as a function of carrier density and note that the gate covers the two electrodes So that we can induce rather uniform change in density as best as we can Now the knob that will be or the tool that we'll be exploring is a simple frown-hofer Interferometry, namely we're going to look at supercurrent flowing through this device between two superconducting contacts and a narrow Strip of the semiconductor here just the 2d electron gas And we're going to look at this at the critical current as a function of perpendicular flux And I want to emphasize the role of this flux is just to generate the frown-hofer Interferometry it is not playing any important role in terms of its alignment of spins and so on it's very weak Magnetic fields on the scale of a few millitesla that we're exploring with a perpendicular field parallel fields will be very large Very large in the Tesla range And so you see that this is just a canonical case in the absence of any parallel magnetic field you see that If you look at the critical current Or zero resistance in this system as a function of the DC current you see that it's very large When the flux is zero and then you get this traditional frown-hofer Interferometry that corresponds to uniform current flow through this channel and here is The corresponding current flow distribution through this structure as analyzed from this frown-hofer pattern So I want to emphasize that here what has been measured is basically zero resistance For example along this cut up until this point where finite resistance develops and that allows us to determine what the critical current is As a function of perpendicular magnetic field Yeah, yes Absolutely Yeah Okay, so as we are going to apply relatively large magnetic field in plane and we're gonna study two superconducting materials aluminum and niobium I want to convince you especially with aluminum that has a relatively low HC one that if you make very thin aluminum Contact and you apply a magnetic field in the plane of that film that the superconducting critical field Of the aluminum film could be very very high and here you see a very old result from 1971 as you reduce the film thickness down to 10 nanometers for example the critical field can exceed several Tesla and this Parallel to the film exactly parallel to the film And here are measurements of Just two contact resistance measurement of each one of the leads showing indeed that our superconducting contact sustain Superconductivity up to magnetic fields in the range of 1.8 Tesla And so whatever effect we see as a function of magnetic field We now know is not a result of basically just eliminating superconductivity in the contacts Now in order to simplify things and acquire data faster I'm not going to show you these Fraunhofer patterns as I showed in the beginning, which is the critical current Versus flux. I'm just going to take a line cut Let's say at zero parallel magnetic field here Of the differential resistance when we're sending a very small current through the junction And what you see is basically that when the system is superconducting the differential resistance is zero And then at the nodes of the Fraunhofer pattern it develops a finite resistance This is the normal resistance and then it becomes superconducting again And then it rises again. And so what we're going to look at we're just going to look at this differential resistance as an Indicator whether the system is superconducting or not. We're not going to know from this measurement what the critical current at any flux is But at least we'll know there is superconductivity taking place. So we're just trying to map out Where is superconductivity present as a function of the in-plane magnetic fields? And so here you see these kind of differential resistance showing zeros Where there is superconductivity and the nodes where the resistance is finite So this you can imagine in your head just as a Fraunhofer pattern And then we're varying the parallel magnetic field and up to something like half a Tesla in plane Nothing really is happening. And by the way the direction of magnetic field is outlined here currently it's applied Perpendicular to the current flow between the two superconducting contacts But as you increase magnetic field further at around one Tesla or one point two Tesla We see that there is no superconductivity left So nowhere as a function of flux can we see a diminished differential resistance meaning the system is no longer superconducting But then if you increase magnetic field further it recovers and it doesn't recover as strong as it used to be And I'll give some indications. Why is that but The the surprising thing for us at least was that superconductivity Restores itself as you increase magnetic field. So it looks like there might be something Oscillating as a function of parallel magnetic field in the superconducting behavior of this junction Now I mentioned that this was aluminum contacts and there there are very few flux jumps So the Fraunhofer interferometry looks quite beautiful Here are the results for niobium here. We can study a larger flux range because the Superconductivity is stronger so critical currents are larger, but basically you see the same effect You see that the Fraunhofer pattern that you observe at zero magnetic field slowly Vanishes and then disappears at about one Tesla But then recovers again and then disappears again and in fact If you just saturate the colors a little bit more you see that it actually Reappears again and disappears again So this supports this notion that there is something oscillating as a function of parallel magnetic field In this device and that's what we'd like to understand here You can see just a line cut trying to detect what is the lowest resistance for any one of these cuts here And indeed you see superconductivity. It's lost At this roughly one Tesla range then it recovers It's lost and then comes back again and lost again and now here the resistance is really not zero So I'm not arguing that we see supercurrent But we believe that if we would to eliminate all noise in our system and cool the system even further below the temperature that it's Being measured we believe that this will become down and will demonstrate superconductivity So it's just an indication that the system wants to behave superconducting in this regime So now we can explore this behavior not only as a function of parallel magnetic field But also as a function of density and so we're taking these kind of Fraunhofer's at different cuts Either as a cut at a finite density as a function of magnetic field This is what you've seen already But here are some cuts where we fix the parallel field and just scan density and you see for example in this particular case That the central lobe is too fine not which is what you expect for a conventional Fraunhofer Interference of uniform current flow, but as the sample depletes it actually recovers a simple interference a cosine Interference pattern, and this is actually the signature of the quantum spin-haul effect that I'm not going to talk about I'm just pointing it out. This is something that we've studied in the past What this diagram is showing us is the reconstruction of where the lowest resistance of the system is as a function of gate Voltage density and magnetic field and you see that This entire region here of magnetic field and density is strongly superconducting the resistance is zero Then it goes away along this kind of yellow. This is normal. This is normalized to the normal resistance So you see that you recover normal resistance and then superconductivity reappears in this place here in this place here It's there is a little bit of tendency towards superconductivity between these two pockets and this regime here I'm not going to talk about this is the regime of the quantum spin-haul effect when the bulk is actually depleted So the question is what is giving rise in particular to this node? And what is the general picture behind this this thing if we repeat the experiment with the niobium Contacts one could see a very similar behavior again This is just the lowest resistance Normalized to the normal resistance and you see as a function of density and magnetic field again the reappearance of Superconductivity here and it actually reappears a little bit here. That's this this pocket at high magnetic field And we just pointed out that the aluminum device maps onto this parameter space in this corner here You see that it's a very similar behavior in this corner What we don't see in the niobium device is this particular pocket But we definitely see this one very much extended up to very high densities I also want to point out that the boundary between these two pockets of superconductivity is not just dependent on magnetic field But it depends on both magnetic field and density and the question is what is the origin of that? So in order to get some insight to what is going on We need to address the band structure and I already alluded to The fact that the system that we are exploring here is an inverted system namely we have holes in the conduction band This will become very very important because the g-factor of the holes is very strongly anisotropic That of the electrons as well, but in particular the g-factor the in-plane g-factor of the holes Because they're composed of spin three-half The in-plane g-factor of a pure hole state is zero So it's hard to understand in that limit why the magnetic field is doing anything But that is only when the density is absolutely zero as you move away from zero density You see that the the states become mixtures of electrons and holes, and so they do acquire a g-factor All right, so this system has been studied quite extents extensively originally by Bernoulli-Cuse and Zhang And what I'm going to be discussing is an extended version of this model that takes into account the various effects of spin orbit interaction So the bulk just the band structure effect without spin orbit Interaction in the system has this kind of shape you see that it's mostly a Dirac like Hamiltonian Linearly dispersing dispersing with momentum where a is the Fermi velocity There are some mass terms that correspond to the opening of the gap That's the gap in this semiconductor and the mass can be negative that corresponds to the inversion of electrons and holes But the important terms that I'll be focusing on are Vulcan version asymmetry So that's a Dresselhaus type spin orbit interaction shown here where the angle theta I'll spend some time later talking about it, but it's basically the angle That is the angle between the momentum directions that we're considering and the crystallographic orientation of the sample So for Dresselhaus that angle matters This is the rush buspin orbit terms structural inversion asymmetry due to some electric field in the system And finally just the same on effect and here I've indicated what the g-factor matrices looks like For the same on effect and note that first of all When the magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the quantum well along the z-direction All four g-factors exist, but they're very different for the electrons and holes and The parallel component of the g-factor you see it's a very sparse matrix It indicates that there are only matrix elements that Take the electron state which is a spin half to a spin minus half and they do not couple at all the whole states Which are three halves to minus three halves and this again is important To factor in all right, so let's let's take a look at this band structure in the absence of spin orbit interaction It just looks like a parabola or something that actually is You know it's more straight. It's it's nearly a dirac like cone at high energies If you include the spin orbit interaction, of course the Fermi surface splits into two Fermi surfaces And here I've outlined what happens with rush buspin orbit interaction Note that the spins orient themselves in the plane in the absence of a magnetic field and you have two Fermi surfaces And with the bulk inversion the Dressel house the way the spins wind is in the opposite direction to the Structural inversion asymmetry so you get patterns that look like that again the Fermi surface is split And depending on the angle that theta the crystallographic orientation you get different types of Orientation of the spins in the plane I don't want you to focus too much on the bulk inversion asymmetry because Experimentally it turns out that it's a weak effect, and we don't really see it So the main effect that I'd like you to consider is the rush buspin orbit and the Zeeman case. I Rather mentioned that the g-factor in this system is zero at the band bottom because it's a purely whole like state And then this g-factor in the plane increases up to the bulk value as the momentum increases in the plane Okay, so so far this was just the single particle properties of the system now what we want to consider is what happens when we're trying to pair Electrons on these Fermi surfaces as induced by the superconductor, so we're trying to do some singlet states and The problem is that once there is the spin orbit interaction. You see that what pairs are Basically, and so this is pure Zeeman. Okay, so let's imagine. We don't have any spin orbit interaction We're just considering Zeeman the Fermi surfaces Of course split one corresponds to spin along the field and one corresponds to spin opposite to the field So that's the spin arrangements, and if we'd like to pair electrons in this case Note that we would pair one electron from the outer Fermi surface It has a spin up and the other one from an inner Fermi surface It has a spin down, but note that that pair now has a finite momentum. It's not centered around zero Similarly its counterpart the down-up version has the opposite momentum so the wave function begins to acquire an interesting phase and And we're gonna explore the implications of that phase I Want to note that this kind of physics is very similar to what happens in superconducting ferromagnetic superconducting junctions Where they're a Zeeman effect effectively exists due to exchange interactions But I want to point out that in this system the nice thing of course is that you can tune the magnitude of that effect It's not just fixed by the exchange interaction Also want to mention that this kind of finite momentum pairing is something that is being discussed in the context of F F Flow states Here it's not an intrinsic effect that we have a pairing amplitude with finite momentum But it's the induced superconductivity that has the finite momentum, but very much an analogy with the F F Flow state so that was the case of and also I want to point out that in the case of Zeeman Note that the momentum of the pair is always in the direction of the propagation of the electrons so every and Every pair here has momentum And it's always aligned with the direction of propagation of the electrons Now let's consider the case of spin orbit interactions strong rush by spin orbit So in the case of strong rush by it's very easy to see that the application of an in-plane magnetic field Shifts one Fermi surface relative to the other in a way that's perpendicular to the direction of the magnetic field So again what happens now? Spin orbit interaction wants to pair electrons within each Fermi surface because the spins are winding So we have opposite spins within the same Fermi surface But the application of magnetic field now shifts one Fermi surface relative to the other again generating a phase But note this phase exists only for electrons moving perpendicular to the magnetic field Whereas for electrons moving along the magnetic field There is no net momentum change because the Fermi surfaces are just moving transversely one with respect to the other and Finally, I'm going to skip the effect of the bulk inversion asymmetry It basically has similar features the pairs acquire a finite momentum as a result of the shifts in the Fermi surface All right, so in order to understand what is the implication What how does that affect superconductivity the critical currents in this device? one can try to consider the situation where One has a tiny speck of superconductor at point x1 and wants to know what is the induced pairing amplitude at a point x2? so the pairing amplitude at point x1 would have some Some magnitude delta corresponding to the superconductivity of aluminum Let's say it has some phase that's given by the phase of the superconductor itself as well as the phase that has to do with the Applied magnetic field in the z direction the weak flux that we're using in order to modulate the interference So that's what appears here and then We need to consider how that order parameter decays in space as we move from point x1 to x2 and What that entails is this kind of Green's function That has the phase of the Cooper pairs as they propagate along the trajectory from x1 to x2 so Phi is just the Overlap the dot product of the shift in momentum the momentum that the pairs have acquired Along the trajectory from x1 to x2 and if we want to know what the Overall energy functional of the system so at point x2 It's going to be just the order parameter lambda 2 Times the induced order parameter at point x2, which is lambda 1 times this Green's function f and So the nice thing is that this phase of the Cooper pair enters this Green function in a very simple way that we can then analyze Semi-classically to get some assess get a feel of how critical currents should look like in the presence of the magnetic field So let's consider the case of only structural inversion asymmetry remember when we apply the magnetic field in this case Along the particular direction the Fermi surfaces move Perpendicular to the direction of the field so momentum now is only acquired along the y direction And what this means is that regardless of what trajectory we're taking here the phase is always the same It's just Delta K y Times W doesn't matter whether the trajectories are diagonal or not. It's always Delta K w so this turns out to produce a term that factors out of the Energy functional and therefore the current as well as the energy is Modulated by this cosine term Delta K times W and this is very much Analogous to what we're observing so here is a calculation based on that simple semi-classical theory of How we expect the critical currents to depend on the parallel magnetic field for the given width in our device and indeed We see that there is an overall cosine dependence and this is the node of that cosine Superconductivity goes away. There is a destruction effect here and then recovers again, and that's exactly what one is seeing here So this happens at high densities With the niobium device we can look to higher magnetic fields, and I want to point again. It doesn't look very much yet Similar to one another but nonetheless this reappearance There is one node here another node here and the simulation for the ideal case shows this kind of periodic behavior just this cosine factor that factors out and this Oscillation is a direct manifestation of the momentum acquired by the pairs as the in-plane magnetic field is applied. I Also want to point out that one can look at the order parameter as is being induced by one contact and One can easily see that it is oscillating in space and one can understand this kind of nodes Simply as having the width of the device corresponding to the place where the order parameter vanishes So not only in principle one can explore this as a function of magnetic field which changes the period of this real space Modulation of the order parameter. In fact one can study devices with different dimensions for a same field and one would then see again The same kind of oscillatory behavior Because this order parameter is now oscillating in space for this particular Case the application of magnetic field in this direction and spin orbit interaction You see that the spatial dependence of the order parameter is only Oscillating a long one axis However, if we look at the Fraunhofer patterns Somewhere at lower density. We see that they they have a slightly qualitative Difference and that is that the central lobe disappears, but the side lobes don't remember that here It actually looked pretty nice in the sense that all lobes more or less disappeared both center and side lobes At low density. We see something a little bit different Central lobe disappears side lobes do not and it turns out that that can be generated if one forgets about spin orbit interaction and includes only Zaman in The case of Zaman remember the momentum acquired is always along the trajectory. So every path here has a different momentum And has a different path length and if one factors this kind of phase factor in the green's function in this Energy functional one can compute what the interference pattern should look like and indeed you see that the center lobe This appears but the side lobes do not and they basically fold into the center one very much like we see here So what we believe is going on here is that at low density where Zaman dominated spin orbit somehow is not so important at large Density spin orbit is dominating Is dominating the physics? Just to contrast the two spatial dependence when we only had the spin orbit interaction I mentioned that the order parameter is oscillating in space only in one direction for the Zaman case It looks like the order parameters oscillating in two directions both along perpendicular to the contact but also Parallel to the contact and these oscillations parallel to the contact are induced by the edges of the semiconductor without edges Those would not exist. It's really an edge effect Okay, what happens now if we rotate the direction of magnetic field? So so far we've applied the magnetic field in this direction Let's apply it now in this direction and again consider only Rajba spin orbit So when we apply magnetic field in this direction Fermi surfaces move perpendicular to the magnetic field So the momentum is in this direction So note that a trajectory that now goes straight the shortest trajectory the one that contributes most Does not acquire a momentum at all or a phase difference but all side trajectories do and again It's very easy to run the calculation and see what one expects in this particular case the Fraunhofer patterns should split And the order parameter in space is oscillating only as a function Parallel to the contact due to the due to the boundaries of the sample One can understand this splitting very simply as if you recall that the Fraunhofer pattern is a Fourier transform of the current distribution Note that when the order parameter has this kind of oscillation the current distribution along this device is oscillatory And this gives rise to this finite momentum Effectively in the Fraunhofer interference patterns, and I want to point out that we very clearly see this kind of V-shape Fraunhofer's but there is a big problem and the problem is quantitative whereas before there was actually a quantitative agreement between the BHZ model and And our data here note that the scale here is 6 Tesla on the simulation and is 600 mili Tesla on the measurement or even less point 15 Tesla to get the same kind of slopes so there's a big discrepancy here and Unfortunately, it turns out that there is another mechanism that can give this kind of V-shape behavior that it's not very interesting So I'm going to spend just a minute on it When you apply the magnetic field in the direction along the current flow the superconductor screens the flux a little bit And so you see you get some per Penetrating flux in the z-direction that's pointing upwards on one side and downwards on the other side And it's very easy to show then that under these conditions The kind of phase factors that are generated by these fluxes give rise to exactly the same kind of V-shape and In this case you can easily get The scale to produce this V-shape on a lower field scale and the true effect of spin orbit interaction in this particular case Is to split the V And that is something that we're not seeing at the moment. It's a very subtle effect and it's very hard to see I want to also point out the asymmetry between positive and negative flux Note that these things are not symmetric and I don't have the time to talk about it, but it has to do With lack of rotational symmetry Of a hundred and eighty degree symmetry of the device itself if the device had a hundred and eighty degree symmetry These V-shape should have been perfectly symmetric Once we understood this kind of screening effect It has also bearing on the magnetic on the field effect When we apply it in this direction in this direction you see that we don't have this effect because the screening takes place here and here So we don't have this kind of flux focusing But if the edge is a little bit jagged it will produce some random fluxes random phases along the edge And again, it's very easy to include the random phase So if you just add some random phase and recalculate what the interference pattern should look like You see that the lowest field lobes remain more or less untouched The next node is strongly centered around zero flux and the third one begins to be very disperse just like we're seeing here So what we believe is that we're very Clearly seeing the signature of this finite momentum real space dependence of the order parameter plus some Unfortunate phase randomization that exists because of the jaggedness of the contacts and that jaggedness is only on a scale of nanometers Is enough to produce this kind of effects of these large magnetic fields Next I'd like to address the boundary this node So in the context of this picture, this is in the picture of the strong spin orbit interaction This node corresponds to the simple condition where the induced momentum of the pairs delta k times the width of the device is just pi over 2 And it's not hard to see that the induced momentum is just given by the ratio of the Zeeman energy to the Fermi velocity It's just the sift of the of the parabola with respect due to the Zeeman effect The fact that the node here this condition is moving to higher field means that at low densities Delta k becomes smaller at the same field and we need to increase the field in order to recover the Interference this node condition so again, we can go back to the theory and Calculate the g-factor the Fermi velocity and the induced pair Momentum at different magnetic field and indeed it has this dependence that I mentioned There is a large induced pair momentum at large density, but that pair momentum is dying off a note It's a complicated thing because the g-factor is zero, but also the Fermi velocity approach is zero How exactly the ratio depends is a detail and this is the outcome You see that there is less momentum induced at low densities Which means we need a larger magnetic field in order to generate the node and that's what these dashed lines are these dashed lines are the theory That tell you where the node should be as a function of density and you see that at large densities They fit very nicely. We don't understand the behavior in this low density regime so with this I'd like to summarize as my time is up and let and just Conclude that in these two-dimensional systems with strong spin orbit the in-plane magnetic field Controllably induces phase shifts Momentum Momentum in the pair in the pairing In the in the Cooper pairs and the order parameter that is induced in this system Oscillates in space in some very interesting direction and in fact one could use this kind of understanding to generate a particular Behavior zero pi junctions, etc. It's simply by engineering the position of the second superconducting electrode and I mentioned that at large density. We understand that this Behavior this momentum induced pairing is primarily due to spin orbit interaction But at low density it looks like it's just Zeeman dominated and the effect of spin orbit interaction is weak That would be thank you Thank you very much


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