Cross Border Organizing Comes Home: UE & FAT in Mexico & Milwaukee

[Excerpt] When Manuel Ortega was sixteen, in 1993, the time arrived that his family had long been dreading. The pesticide-ridden land from which they eked out a living in Mexico could no longer maintain them all, and some of them had to leave. Manuel, his father, and two of his brothers headed north across the border to find a living in the United States. Manuel (not his real name) and his father went to Milwaukee, while his two brothers went to California. They found sporadic employment as farm workers, dishwashers and busboys, sending home as much money as they could to Manuel\u27s mother and brother, who had stayed on the land. Later, one of his brothers joined them in Milwaukee. Early in 1994, Manuel got hired at a Milwaukee factory, Aluminum Casting & Engineering Company. His brother Jose soon followed. Like many Mexicans, the Ortegas suffered a personal crisis parallel to the general economic crisis gripping Mexico in the \u2790s. Even before the devaluation of the peso, even at the height of Mexico\u27s economic miracle, campesinos (small-farmers) were forced northward by economic necessity to seek work in the States. And like the Ortegas, they face a new set of problems here: separation from their families, a cold climate, the Immigration Service, unfamiliar language and customs, racism, violence, poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods, and degrading and exploitative work. Relying at first on guidance from friends and relatives who arrived before them, sometimes living two and three to a room to make ends meet they cautiously feel their way in the new environment. Many, like Manuel Ortega, miss their life back home and wish it were possible to find work there, but nonetheless face life up north with cheer and humor

[Review of] Peter Manuel. Popular Musics of the Non- Western World

This is a wide-ranging, insightful and often fascinating survey of popular ethnic musics of the world. The title is perhaps a bit misleading. By western Manuel clearly means modern Northern European and those parts of the Americas most directly influenced by the Anglo-Germanic traditions of Northern Europe. This is certainly a current and popular connotation for the word, and most readers should have no trouble with Manuel\u27s use of the term in this way. Readers who are used to thinking of western as comprising Europe, Africa and the Americas, however, will have to make adjustments. Manuel excludes consideration of westernized popular music forms as Greek rebetika and Jamaican reggae and ska

Supersymmetries of the spin-1/2 particle in the field of magnetic vortex, and anyons

The quantum nonrelativistic spin-1/2 planar systems in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field are known to possess the N=2 supersymmetry. We consider such a system in the field of a magnetic vortex, and find that there are just two self-adjoint extensions of the Hamiltonian that are compatible with the standard N=2 supersymmetry. We show that only in these two cases one of the subsystems coincides with the original spinless Aharonov-Bohm model and comes accompanied by the super-partner Hamiltonian which allows a singular behavior of the wave functions. We find a family of additional, nonlocal integrals of motion and treat them together with local supercharges in the unifying framework of the tri-supersymmetry. The inclusion of the dynamical conformal symmetries leads to an infinitely generated superalgebra, that contains several representations of the superconformal osp(2|2) symmetry. We present the application of the results in the framework of the two-body model of identical anyons. The nontrivial contact interaction and the emerging N=2 linear and nonlinear supersymmetries of the anyons are discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure, published versio

A natural orbital method for the electron momentum distribution in matter

A variational method for many electron system is applied to momentum distribution calculations. The method uses a generating two-electron geminal and the amplitudes of the occupancies of one particle natural orbitals as variational parameters. It introduces correlation effects beyond the free fermion nodal structure.Comment: 3 pages, Latex, revised paper with new reference

Renormalisation in Quantum Mechanics

We study a recently proposed quantum action depending on temperature. We construct a renormalisation group equation describing the flow of action parameters with temperature. At zero temperature the quantum action is obtained analytically and is found free of higher time derivatives. It makes the quantum action an ideal tool to investigate quantum chaos and quantum instantons.Comment: replaced version with new figs. Text (LaTeX), 3 Figs. (ps

Isotropization by QCD Plasma Instabilities

Numerical solutions of the Wong-Yang-Mills equations with anisotropic particle momentum distributions are presented. Their isotropization by collective effects due to the classical Yang-Mills field is shown.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, contribution to the Quark Matter 2005 proceeding

Hidden nonlinear su(2|2) superunitary symmetry of N=2 superextended 1D Dirac delta potential problem

We show that the N=2 superextended 1D quantum Dirac delta potential problem is characterized by the hidden nonlinear $su(2|2)$ superunitary symmetry. The unexpected feature of this simple supersymmetric system is that it admits three different $\mathbb Z_2$-gradings, which produce a separation of 16 integrals of motion into three different sets of 8 bosonic and 8 fermionic operators. These three different graded sets of integrals generate two different nonlinear, deformed forms of $su(2|2)$, in which the Hamiltonian plays a role of a multiplicative central charge. On the ground state, the nonlinear superalgebra is reduced to the two distinct 2D Euclidean analogs of a superextended Poincar\'e algebra used earlier in the literature for investigation of spontaneous supersymmetry breaking. We indicate that the observed exotic supersymmetric structure with three different $\mathbb Z_2$-gradings can be useful for the search of hidden symmetries in some other quantum systems, in particular, related to the Lam\'e equation.Comment: 11 pages; comments and refs. added, version published in PL

Neutrino Rates in Color Flavor Locked Quark Matter

We study the weak interaction rates involving Goldstone bosons in the Color Flavor Locked (CFL) quark matter. Neutrino mean free path and the rate of energy loss due to neutrino emission in a thermal plasma of CFL pions and kaons is calculated. We find that in addition to neutrino scattering off thermal mesons, novel Cherenkov like processes wherein mesons are either emitted or absorbed contribute to the neutrino opacity. Lack of Lorentz invariance in the medium and loss of rotational invariance for processes involving mesons moving relative to the medium allow for novel processes such as $\pi^0 \to \nu \bar{\nu}$ and $e^- \pi^+ \to \nu_e$. We explore and comment on various astrophysical implications of our finding.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

Non-Abelian Chern-Simons Particles in an External Magnetic Field

The quantum mechanics and thermodynamics of SU(2) non-Abelian Chern-Simons particles (non-Abelian anyons) in an external magnetic field are addressed. We derive the N-body Hamiltonian in the (anti-)holomorphic gauge when the Hilbert space is projected onto the lowest Landau level of the magnetic field. In the presence of an additional harmonic potential, the N-body spectrum depends linearly on the coupling (statistics) parameter. We calculate the second virial coefficient and find that in the strong magnetic field limit it develops a step-wise behavior as a function of the statistics parameter, in contrast to the linear dependence in the case of Abelian anyons. For small enough values of the statistics parameter we relate the N-body partition functions in the lowest Landau level to those of SU(2) bosons and find that the cluster (and virial) coefficients dependence on the statistics parameter cancels.Comment: 35 pages, revtex, 3 eps figures include