Critical Point Field Mixing in an Asymmetric Lattice Gas Model

The field mixing that manifests broken particle-hole symmetry is studied for a 2-D asymmetric lattice gas model having tunable field mixing properties. Monte Carlo simulations within the grand canonical ensemble are used to obtain the critical density distribution for different degrees of particle-hole asymmetry. Except in the special case when this asymmetry vanishes, the density distributions exhibit an antisymmetric correction to the limiting scale-invariant form. The presence of this correction reflects the mixing of the critical energy density into the ordering operator. Its functional form is found to be in excellent agreement with that predicted by the mixed-field finite-size-scaling theory of Bruce and Wilding. A computational procedure for measuring the significant field mixing parameter is also described, and its accuracy gauged by comparing the results with exact values obtained analytically.Comment: 10 Pages, LaTeX + 8 figures available from author on request, To appear in Z. Phys.

Finite-temperature geometric properties of the Kitaev honeycomb model

We study finite-temperature topological properties of the Kitaev’s spin-honeycomb model in the vortex-free sector with the use of the recently introduced mean Uhlmann curvature. We employ an appropriate fermionization procedure to study the system as a two-band p-wave superconductor described by a Bogoliubov–de Gennes Hamiltonian. This allows us to study relevant quantities such as Berry and mean Uhlmann curvatures in a simple setting. More specifically, we consider the spin honeycomb in the presence of an external magnetic field breaking time-reversal symmetry. The introduction of such an external perturbation opens up a gap in the phase of the system characterized by non-Abelian statistics. The resulting model belongs to a symmetry-protected class, so that the Uhlmann number can be analyzed. We first consider the Berry curvature on a particular evolution line over the phase diagram. The mean Uhlmann curvature and the Uhlmann number are then analyzed by assuming a thermal state. The mean Uhlmann curvature describes a crossover effect as temperature rises. In the trivial phase, a nonmonotonic dependence of the Uhlmann number, as temperature increases, is reported and explained

Crystal properties of eigenstates for quantum cat maps

Using the Bargmann-Husimi representation of quantum mechanics on a torus phase space, we study analytically eigenstates of quantized cat maps. The linearity of these maps implies a close relationship between classically invariant sublattices on the one hand, and the patterns (or `constellations') of Husimi zeros of certain quantum eigenstates on the other hand. For these states, the zero patterns are crystals on the torus. As a consequence, we can compute explicit families of eigenstates for which the zero patterns become uniformly distributed on the torus phase space in the limit $\hbar\to 0$. This result constitutes a first rigorous example of semi-classical equidistribution for Husimi zeros of eigenstates in quantized one-dimensional chaotic systems.Comment: 43 pages, LaTeX, including 7 eps figures Some amendments were made in order to clarify the text, mainly in the 4 first sections. Figures are unchanged. To be published in: Nonlinearit

Helical Jet in the Gravitationally Lensed Blazar PKS1830-211

Recent radio VLBI observations of the complex gravitationally lensed system PKS1830-211 have thrown up some questions with regard to the processes occuring at the heart of the blazar source at a redshift of 2.51, which is viewed almost straight down the jet axis. This work links, by a model of a helical jet tracked by ballistically ejected plasmons from a precessing nozzle, observations on the scale of tens of microarcseconds to those on the scale of milliarcseconds. An observed jet precession period of 1.08 years is inferred from the model, translating to an intrinsic period of 30.8 years for a source at redshift 2.51 and an assumed jet bulk velocity of 0.99 c. This fits well with the picture of an active galactic nucleus hosting a binary black hole system at its centre, with the jet emitted by one member of the system, and the precession as being due to its orbital motion around its companion.Comment: Accepted for publication in the MNRA

A Variational Stereo Method for the Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Ocean Waves

We develop a novel remote sensing technique for the observation of waves on the ocean surface. Our method infers the 3-D waveform and radiance of oceanic sea states via a variational stereo imagery formulation. In this setting, the shape and radiance of the wave surface are given by minimizers of a composite energy functional that combines a photometric matching term along with regularization terms involving the smoothness of the unknowns. The desired ocean surface shape and radiance are the solution of a system of coupled partial differential equations derived from the optimality conditions of the energy functional. The proposed method is naturally extended to study the spatiotemporal dynamics of ocean waves and applied to three sets of stereo video data. Statistical and spectral analysis are carried out. Our results provide evidence that the observed omnidirectional wavenumber spectrum S(k) decays as k-2.5 is in agreement with Zakharov's theory (1999). Furthermore, the 3-D spectrum of the reconstructed wave surface is exploited to estimate wave dispersion and currents