[iliatoli]

Author here. Three PhDs (Mathematics, Pisa; Quantum Chemistry, UCF; Materials Science, UTD — in progress), plus MS degrees from SJSU and CSU. The gmail is because this is independent work, not affiliated with any institution. v53 reflects thirteen years of development since the original 2013 publication (Graphene 1, 107–109). The barrier is verified at two independent levels of theory with a confirmed transition state. Happy to discuss the physics.

[ricardobeat]

That’s amazing. Do you have a home lab with an atomic microscope where you do your research?

And what’s the reason for going solo vs a research university, where I assume this type of research could be significantly sped up?

[iliatoli]

No lab — the work is computational. All calculations run on a Dell Precision workstation with ORCA (quantum chemistry) software. An experimental collaborator is now preparing the C-AFM validation. The solo approach is a consequence of the work spanning multiple fields that don't share a single department.

[mastermage]

Couldn't you potentially get some smaller grants from each of the fields? Or is that too much paperwork. It always seems so much work to get those grants.

[Filligree]

Getting a grant from a single field is already a full-time job; the research typically gets done as overtime.

[rcxdude]

It's a near full-time job in and of itself, and the nature of them means that you really want to get a grant for something you've already done and use the scraps from it to fund the new stuff.

[mastermage]

I knew it was a pain getting grants but not that its well that much of a pain.

[hgoel]

Is there a reason you went for 3 PhDs? Especially since they're all in STEM? To me it's a red flag because the point of a PhD is to learn to do research, you don't need to get another one to move between fields (especially within STEM), just need to do research with people in those fields and gain experience.

[iliatoli]

Each PhD was in a different country and decade. Mathematics (Pisa, 2000s), Quantum Chemistry (UCF, 2010s), Materials Science (UTD, now). The fluorographane work exists because all three converge — the barrier calculation is quantum chemistry, the proof structure is mathematics, and the material is materials science. I didn't plan it this way.

[hgoel]

Ah, that's interesting. Different countries can be a fair reason I suppose.

[iliatoli]

Fair question. In my case, each PhD opened a door that didn't exist from the previous position. The mathematics PhD in Italy didn't give me access to computational chemistry labs in the US. The quantum chemistry PhD didn't give me access to materials science groups. Immigration, funding structures, and departmental boundaries created the path — not a desire for credentials. The fluorographane paper is the proof that the path was worth it.

[juleiie]

Some people actually enjoy studying and learning in these spaces. Does everything have to be optimized for?

[hgoel]

What's so special about specifically the PhD student experience that isn't accessible once you have the PhD?

My experience has been that research became much more fulfilling after finishing my PhD. I got more research independence, the level of work I was expected to do increased, and as a bonus, my salary almost tripled. It was like having the world open up, and starting to really experience being a scientist without my PI protecting me.

I was curious about their decisions because if you're taking on the opportunity cost of a PhD, it's probably because you enjoy research, but if you enjoy research, you wouldn't keep going back to the starting point. So, without additional context, it seemed like they just wanted the credentials.

I think it was also worth asking because universities often want to know why you want another PhD, since from their perspective, spending that funding on someone with no PhD potentially creates a new researcher (vs spending it on an existing researcher). So, if they managed to get into a PhD program again, they probably had a good reason.

Their response about different countries is an explanation (especially from an immigration angle), it's not like I'm asking them to lay out all their personal circumstances behind the decision in detail.

[nine_k]

3 PhDs is quite some dedication to science, given that a PhD student life is neither that of plenty nor leisure.

[juleiie]

Some people do not need to worry about material possessions as much as some others because of the random birth wealth lottery. Then they can pursue interests in less goal driven ways than it would otherwise seem wise

[chmod775]

In many European counties it's easily feasible to just study all your life while working ~20 hours / week. I won no lottery but had no issue spending a decade of my life pursuing interests at universities while working 20-30 / hours a week in a comfortable software dev job.

If I'm paying for "free" education with my tax euros, I might as well use it.

[alemwjsl]

There are lots of stipends etc. If you don't plan to have kids, and you don't care about luxuries, you will have healthy food and a roof and not be thinking about money. Probably the decision is to forgo luxuries and child raising, and hope you don't need to help a sick relative etc. if you want do to this forever. But it is not impossible in STEM.

[cluckindan]

That works as long as you don’t expect to graduate: in many EU nations, higher education students are required to complete at least 60 ECTS credits per year, or lose their study right / enrollment.

[gus_massa]

What were the topics and titles of your dissertation in the first two PhD? Were they related to this topic or totally different?

Edit: https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=61429 It looks quite unrelated

[iliatoli]

First PhD: algebraic cryptanalysis (Pisa). Second PhD: exact solutions to the Schrödinger equation for few-body systems (UCF). Both unrelated to fluorographane — the connection emerged later.

[edfletcher_t137]

This is their referenced 2013 paper on the subject:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258423577_Data_Stor...

Clearly they have been working on this for over a decade.

[iliatoli]

The journal (Graphene, ASP) ceased operations and the DOI infrastructure went dark. The paper itself is archived at ResearchGate: researchgate.net/publication/258423577. The content is independently verifiable.

[gus_massa]

I wanted to check the journal where it was published, there are good journals and bad journals.It's very strange that the doi is dead. I found this http://www.aspbs.com/graphene/contents_graphene2013.htm but it's also full of dead links.

[foota]

Hey -- I have 0 PHDs so take this with a grain of salt :)

I had thought for a while about a way to store data that makes use of an idea that I had for sub-diffraction limited imaging inspired by STED microscopy.

First an overview of STED. You have a "donut" shaped laser (or toroidal laser) that is fired on a sample. This laser has an inner hole that is below the diffraction limit. This laser is used to deplete the ability of the sample to fluoresce, and then immediately after a second laser is shone on the same spot. The parts of the sample depleted by the donut laser don't fluoresce and so you only see the donut hole fluoresce. This allows you to image below the diffraction limit.

My idea was to apply this along with a layer in the material that exhibits sum frequency generation (SFG). The idea is that you can shine the donut laser with frequency A and a gaussian laser with frequency B at the same spot. When they interact in the SFG material you get some third frequency C as a result of SFG. Then, below that material would be a material that doesn't transmit frequencies C and A.

Then what you'd be left with after the light shines through those two layers is some amount of light at frequency B. The brightness inside the hole and outside of the hole would depend on how much of the light from frequency B converts into frequency C. Sum frequency generation is a very inefficient process, with only some tiny portion of the light participating, but my thinking is that if laser B is significantly less bright than laser A, then what will happen is that most of the light from laser B will participate in sum frequency generation where it mixes with laser A, and that you'll be left with only a tiny bit of laser A outside of the hole, so that you get a nice contrast ratio for the light at frequency A between the hole and the surroundings that then allow you to image whatever is below these layers below the diffraction limit.

In my idea the final layer is some kind of optical storage medium that can be be read/written by the laser below the diffraction limit. Obviously aiming this would be hard :) My idea was that it would be some kind of spinning disk, but I never really got to that point.

[YZF]

Curious if you've patented this? Very cool. The physics is way beyond me but I understand that each atom in the crystal can be in two states? And those are stable? There is no cross talk or decay at all?

You're comparing to current memory technologies but there are also some optical technologies like AIE-DDPR which presumably is (a lot?) less dense but has layers (I noticed you're also discussing a volumetric implementation), would devices based on your technology be simpler/faster? (I guess optical disks don't intend to replace high speed memory). What about access times?

[iliatoli]

Patent strategy is under consideration. Happy to discuss offline — [e-mail].

[_alternator_]

Have you considered subjecting this to expert scrutiny by submitting to a journal? That's probably better than getting hot takes on HN by random technology enthusiasts, skeptics, anon experts, and trolls.

[tux3]

Realistically I don't see how this could be submitted to a journal as-is.

I'm sure you could take this material and write a couple papers out of it, but right now this is a 60 page word document with commentary on a variety of topics from memory market economics to quantum computing.

It's full of self-congratulatory language like "The transition is not an incremental improvement within the existing paradigm; it obsoletes the paradigm and the infrastructure built around it". Alright, I'm happy to believe that this work is important. But this is not the neutral tone of a scientific article, it reads like ad copy for a new technology.

I'm sure there's interesting physics in there, but it needs a serious editing effort before it could be taken seriously by a journal.

[iliatoli]

The paper has been under peer review at Physica Scripta (IOP) since March 25. The reviewers will decide what stays and what's trimmed. You're reading a preprint, not the final version. The tone in the architecture sections reflects the scope of the claim — reviewers may ask me to moderate it, and I will. The core physics (Sections 2–3) is standard computational chemistry: DFT, transition state optimization, CCSD(T) validation. Those sections read like any other ab initio paper.

[_alternator_]

Just remember Watson and Crick's famously humble line in their 1953 Nature paper: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

Big discoveries will speak for themselves.

[iliatoli]

It's under peer review at Physica Scripta (IOP) since March 25. HN is for visibility, not validation.

[GTP]

It would be interesting to hear back after this passes peer review.