Range separation: The divide between local structures and field theories

This work presents parallel histories of the development of two modern theories of condensed matter: the theory of electron structure in quantum mechanics, and the theory of liquid structure in statistical mechanics. Comparison shows that key revelations in both are not only remarkably similar, but even follow along a common thread of controversy that marks progress from antiquity through to the present. This theme appears as a creative tension between two competing philosophies, that of short range structure (atomistic models) on the one hand, and long range structure (continuum or density functional models) on the other. The timeline and technical content are designed to build up a set of key relations as guideposts for using density functional theories together with atomistic simulation.Comment: Expanded version of a 30 minute talk delivered at the 2018 TSRC workshop on Ions in Solution, to appear in the March, 2019 issue of Substantia (https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/subs/index

Hidden-variable theory versus Copenhagen quantum mechanics

The main assumptions the Copenhagen quantum mechanics has been based on will be summarized and the known (not yet decided) contradiction between Einstein and Bohr will be newly analyzed. The given assumptions have been represented basically by time-dependent Schroedinger equation, to which some further assumptions have been added. Some critical comments have been raised against the given mathematical model structure by Pauli (1933) and by Susskind and Glogover (1964). They may be removed if only the Schroedinger equation is conserved and the additional assumptions are abandoned, as shown recently. It seems to be in contradiction to the numerous declarations that the Copenhagen model has been approved by experimental results. However, in the most of these experiments only the agreement with the mere Schroedinger equation has been tested. All mentioned assumptions have been tested practically only in the EPR experiment (measurement of coincidence light transmission through two polarizers) proposed originally by Einstein (1935). Also these experimental results have been interpreted as supporting the Copenhagen alternative, which has not been, however, true. In fact the microscopic world may be described correspondingly only with the help of the hidden-variable theory that is represented by the Schroedinger equation without mentioned additional assumptions, which has the consequence that the earlier interpretation gap between microscopic and macroscopic worlds has been removed. The only difference concerns the existence of discrete states. The possibilities of the human reason of getting to know the nature will be also shortly discussed in the beginning of this contribution.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures; v2: local refinements and improvements of the tex

Stochastic modeling of excitable dynamics: improved Langevin model for mesoscopic channel noise

Influence of mesoscopic channel noise on excitable dynamics of living cells became a hot subject within the last decade, and the traditional biophysical models of neuronal dynamics such as Hodgkin-Huxley model have been generalized to incorporate such effects. There still exists but a controversy on how to do it in a proper and computationally efficient way. Here we introduce an improved Langevin description of stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley dynamics with natural boundary conditions for gating variables. It consistently describes the channel noise variance in a good agreement with discrete state model. Moreover, we show by comparison with our improved Langevin model that two earlier Langevin models by Fox and Lu also work excellently starting from several hundreds of ion channels upon imposing numerically reflecting boundary conditions for gating variables.Comment: V.M. Mladenov and P.C. Ivanov (Eds.): NDES 2014, Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 438 (Springer, Switzerland, 2014), pp. 325-33