Scirtothrips perseae (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) : a new species infesting avocado in southern California

Scirtothrips perseae new species is described. It is a pest of avocado in southern California

Low Energy Effective Field Theories of Sp(4) Spin systems

We study the classical and quantum phase transitions of Sp(4) spin systems on three dimensional stacked square and triangular lattices. We present general Ginzburg-Landau field theories for various types of Sp(4) spin orders with different ground state manifolds such as CP(3), S^7/Z_2, Grassmann manifold G_{2,5}, G_{2,6} and so on, based on which the nature of the classical phase transitions are studied, and a global phase diagram is presented. The classical phase transitions close to quantum phase transitions toward spin liquid states are also discussed based on renormalization group (RG) flow. Our results can be directly applied to the simplest Sp(4) and SU(4) Heisenberg models which can be realized using spin-3/2 atoms and Alkaline earth atoms trapped in optical lattice.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

On the Z2Z_2 classification of Quantum Spin Hall Models

We propose an alternative formulation of the $Z_2$ topological index for quantum spin Hall systems and band insulators when time reversal invariance is not broken. The index is expressed in terms of the Chern numbers of the bands of the model, and a connection with the number of pairs of robust edge states is thus established. The alternative index is easy to compute in most cases of interest. We also discuss connections with the recently proposed spin Chern number for quantum spin Hall models.Comment: Presentation changed to improve clarity, some technical aspects of the topological arguments including material previously cited as unpublished notes have now been added as an appendi