Chemistry — the study of what things are made of.
A small observatory.
A personal archive. Experimental notes — and a few stray things from elsewhere.
Notes.
I study chemistry. I also study the internet — its interfaces, its small rooms, the way it feels late at night.
This is not a portfolio. It is an archive. Experiments I have not finished, ideas I keep returning to, fragments collected from books and screens.
Currently observing: d-orbital colour, the silence inside single-player games, the small decisions interfaces make that no one notices.
All 118, on one quiet page.
A whole table, open to anyone. Tap an element to slow the room down and let its electrons turn — a small history of who first held it, and what they said.
- Alkali metal
- Alkaline earth
- Transition metal
- Post-transition
- Metalloid
- Nonmetal
- Halogen
- Noble gas
- Lanthanide
- Actinide
click any element.
← swipe →
Logs.
Basics.
Short notes on the physics of solids. From crystal lattices to superconductivity. Written for whoever needs them — knowledge does not belong to a closed room.
Crystal lattices
order, with a repeat unit.
A crystal is a lattice plus a basis. In three dimensions there are only fourteen distinct Bravais lattices. Most metals settle into FCC, BCC, or HCP arrangements. Symmetry is not decoration here — it sets what the solid is allowed to do.
Reciprocal space
the dual frame where momentum lives.
Real space says where. Reciprocal space says how often. Every real lattice has its mirror in reciprocal space. The first Brillouin zone is the smallest cell of that mirror — small, but enough to hold every electron state the crystal can carry.
Bloch waves
a wavefunction that respects the lattice.
In a periodic potential, every electron wavefunction can be written as a plane wave wrapped in a periodic envelope. Solutions are indexed by a wavevector k. Energy as a function of k is the band structure. Insulators, metals and semiconductors are simply different ways of filling those bands.
Fermi surface
the boundary between filled and empty.
At zero temperature, electrons fill states up to the Fermi energy. Plot the edge of those filled states in k-space and you get a surface — sometimes a clean sphere, sometimes a strange polyhedron. Most of a metal's transport behaviour lives on that surface, not far below it.
Phonons
lattice vibrations, quantised.
A solid is not silent; its atoms hum. Those vibrations come in modes, and the modes can be counted like photons. Phonons carry heat, scatter electrons, and dominate the low-temperature specific heat — Debye T³ at the cold end, Dulong–Petit at the warm end.
Magnetism
spins, coupled.
Diamagnetism appears in everything. Paramagnetism shows up when spins are free. Order — ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic, ferrimagnetic — emerges when spins start talking to each other through exchange. Above the critical temperature they forget; below it, they line up. The pattern they choose decides what the magnet does.
Superconductivity
electrons, paired against scattering.
Below a critical temperature, certain metals lose all electrical resistance and push magnetic fields out of their interior. BCS theory explains this as electrons pairing through a phonon-mediated attraction — Cooper pairs, condensed into a single quantum state. Unconventional superconductors break this picture in interesting ways. We still do not fully understand them.
Topological matter
properties that survive deformation.
Some quantum states are characterised not by symmetry but by topology — a hidden integer that cannot change unless the system is pushed through a phase transition. From this come the quantum Hall effect, topological insulators, and their robust conducting edge states. A different way of asking what a phase of matter even is.
Written from common physics literature. Errors are mine, and any clarifications are welcome.
Signal.
If you decode it, you get one sentence. That is all.