Melting of Hard Cubes

The melting transition of a system of hard cubes is studied numerically both in the case of freely rotating cubes and when there is a fixed orientation of the particles (parallel cubes). It is shown that freelly rotating cubes melt through a first-order transition, whereas parallel cubes have a continuous transition in which positional order is lost but bond-orientational order remains finite. This is interpreted in terms of a defect-mediated theory of meltingComment: 5 pages, 3 figures included. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Toric Cubes

A toric cube is a subset of the standard cube defined by binomial inequalities. These basic semialgebraic sets are precisely the images of standard cubes under monomial maps. We study toric cubes from the perspective of topological combinatorics. Explicit decompositions as CW-complexes are constructed. Their open cells are interiors of toric cubes and their boundaries are subcomplexes. The motivating example of a toric cube is the edge-product space in phylogenetics, and our work generalizes results known for that space.Comment: to appear in Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo (special issue on Algebraic Geometry

EPW Cubes

We construct a new 20-dimensional family of projective 6-dimensional irreducible holomorphic symplectic manifolds. The elements of this family are deformation equivalent with the Hilbert scheme of three points on a K3 surface and are constructed as natural double covers of special codimension 3 subvarieties of the Grassmanian G(3,6). These codimension 3 subvarieties are defined as Lagrangian degeneracy loci and their construction is parallel to that of EPW sextics, we call them the EPW cubes. As a consequence we prove that the moduli space of polarized IHS sixfolds of K3-type, Beauville-Bogomolov degree 4 and divisibility 2 is unirational.Comment: minor corrections, 25 pages, to appear in J. Reine Angew. Mat

Complexities of Bi-Colored Rubik\u27s Cubes

Which of two bi-colored cubes is the simpler puzzle? The differences in the coloring of the cubes creates different symmetries that dramatically reduce the number of states each cube can reach. Which of the symmetries is most reductive? The answer to these questions can be achieved by discovering and comparing the “God’s Number” for these cubes