Dispatches from Cuba: A day in the lab

Physics Today‘s Toni Feder recently traveled to Cuba to learn about the country’s physics community and how it has been affected by the further relaxation of US–Cuba relations. She produced a series of blog posts about her experiences. You can read Toni’s previous post here .

Tuesday, 6 December 2016

My first order of business today was to go to the International Press Office, which is part of the Ministry of External Relations (MINREX), to get official permission to work here in Cuba as a journalist. I had the paperwork, photos, and money with me, and I was in and out of the office in less than an hour. When I first applied for a visa to come to Cuba, I had to submit a list of names of people I’d like to meet while here, and I was told that MINREX would arrange my schedule. No itinerary arrived before I left for Cuba—perhaps in part because of the death of Fidel Castro.

Some of my contacts here have made me hope that the government-provided itinerary is “soft,” so that I can make my own plans to meet physicists and other scientists. A few hours after obtaining my accreditation, I received word that one appointment had been made for me. It’s with a respected physicist who is also active in policymaking, so I am pleased—both about the appointment and the apparent flexibility with the rest of my time.

This afternoon I visited Ernesto Altshuler’s labs at the University of Havana and met his students. Both their research and the equipment they have devised are creative, clever, and very much driven by a lack of resources. Ernesto used to focus mainly on superconductivity. He still has a hand in it, using a setup that includes 20-year-old instruments along with newer items donated by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, and by labs in the UK and US. Ernesto made a point of not naming the US donors for fear of getting them into hot water. He and his students take measurements on superconducting tapes from Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago. But the group hasn’t had liquid nitrogen for a couple of months, which has stalled the experiments.

Recently Ernesto’s experimental work has migrated to complexity and statistical physics. In one experiment, his students are examining how ants signal each other. The ants are collected outside at night when they are active and then returned after donating their time to science. Do they communicate through pheromones alone? Via contact? “We are trying to figure out the mechanism,” says Ernesto, recalling how the idea grew out of a conversation, fueled by Cuban rum, with a colleague in the UK who studies collective behavior.

Groups of ants are placed in cells separated by walls of varying thickness and structure. On one side a repellent is added. The ants’ behavior is tracked by taking successive photos. The students extract such information as the ant center of mass to determine if the insects could communicate warnings through a given barrier.

Another project involves sand. For that, says student Leonardo Domínguez Rubio, getting materials is more fun than gathering ants: He goes to the beach. Leonardo has cobbled together a clever apparatus with which to measure the profile of a growing pile of sand. Sand is dropped onto the pile from a constant height, accomplished by ratcheting up the depositor as the sand pile grows. Using scavenged items that include a sensor from a computer, the team measures the properties of the sand pile. One aim is to learn about the transition from continuous to intermittent avalanches.

The students, who officially become faculty members once they’ve earned their undergraduate degree, all seem enthusiastic. One is hoping to do his PhD in the US—he has an offer and is waiting for a visa. Another student has been invited to the ICTP for his PhD.

For Ernesto and others who have stayed in Cuba, seeing their students leave evokes mixed emotions. It’s clear that current conditions in Cuba make it very tough to build a career as a scientist. It’s hard to stay knowing you have few opportunities to use first-rate equipment like that used routinely by colleagues elsewhere. And on the salary side, “we need to invert the pyramid,” as one physicist put it to me, so that professionals can live from their pay. That requires about an order of magnitude increase in salary, physicists told me. Cuba’s physicists are proud of their students’ track record in getting jobs abroad. At the same time, they are sad to see so much brain drain.